This also explains why GRUB (stage 2) can be installed in many -- but not all -- filesystems: It needs to contain (read-only) filesystem drivers so as to be able to go and fetch menu.lst (and vmlinuz-* or whatever you tell it to load).
I'm thinking the idea of keeping a "really small" Linux (and GRUB) installation in one partition and your "main" Linux installation in another would be quite handy (and using the small installation to recovery in case the main one ever gets into trouble), although I suppose there's not a lot that would provide that you couldn't get from booting from a memory stick. (Or possibly a CD ROM, although there you have no ability to save little text notes to yourself or whatever.)
After reading the link provided in the thread here, I also found this one useful:
formatting link
(I've come across that web site before in Googling around for Linux stuff -- you can't say IBM doesn't have some pretty savvy guys working for them...).
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Dec 2009 16:18:35 -0800) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :
Well, to be honest, I no longer use those .deb and .rpm methods of installing. I do the dependencies by hand. That does create some problems, sometimes, but I compile things from source. For example I use the grml distro these days (
formatting link
), it is debian based, but I have an old version (one of the first ones), and compiled hundreds of new packages and replaced x.org with xfree, added stuff, it is now 'Panteltje Linux'. If you try to install a .deb file on it, then it will not even be possible.
Slackware did it originally the right way: tar.gz or tgz is the way to go. You will get a message when a lib is out of date. And on a binary you can always see what you need by using ldd: grml: ~ # whereis NewsFleX NewsFleX: /usr/local/bin/NewsFleX grml: ~ # ldd /usr/local/bin/NewsFleX linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7f40000) libforms.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libforms.so.1 (0xb7eaf000) libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0xb7e8a000) libXpm.so.4 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0xb7e7c000) libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/tls/libcrypt.so.1 (0xb7e4e000) libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7d1b000) libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7c5c000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f68000) libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb7c4f000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/libdl.so.2 (0xb7c4b000) grml: ~ #
On a sunny day (Wed, 2 Dec 2009 17:58:46 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@radagast.org (Dave Platt) wrote in :
'grub-install' may fail o nsome systems, cant remember teh reason, but you can start grub manually ,and enter the commands. Here is the kernel-howto I wrote for myself, grub install on variuos media is at the end. This works, as I have compiled and installed many kernels on this system using that. howto. It was once intended to be a script, but bette just read it.. and do it manually.
Kernel update howto copyright Jan Panteltje 2009-always, released under GPL2
# Instructions how to update kernel
Change the link in /usr/src for 'linux' to point to the new kernel with rm linux;ln -s new-kernel linux.
cd /usr/src/linux
# UPDATE DVB DRIVER (only if you use xdipo and associated software for satellite). joe /usr/src/linux/drivers/media/dvb/dvb-core/dmxdev.h # change #define DVR_BUFFER_SIZE (10*188*1024) to: # #define DVR_BUFFER_SIZE (100*188*1024)
#SAVE THE .config file!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! cp .config .config.LAST
make mrproper
### SELECT xterm, NOT rxvt, else config crashes!!!!!! ### Use ctl BACKSPACE for backspace
# for boot with grub from ext2 on hdc6 mount /dev/hdd6 /mnt/hdd6 cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /mnt/hdd6/vmlinuz-$1 cp /usr/src/linux/System.map /mnt/hdd6/System.map-$1
umount /dev/hdd6
# Test new kernel like this from grub command line: # >kernel (hd2,5)/vmlinuz-XXXXXX root=/dev/hdc7 # >boot
# Make a grub boot CD-RW or DVD+RW #joe iso/boot/grub/menu.lst cd mkdir -p iso/boot/grub cp /lib/grub/i386-pc/stage2_eltorito iso/boot/grub mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4
-boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso ls -rtl *.iso #burn-cd-image grub.iso # Use a DVD-RW burn-dvd-image grub.iso
# Installing grub to hda: #Copy all grub files, including stage1 and stage2 to /mny/hda1/boot/grub
If you get puppy Linux on a CD, you can boot it from CD. It does all the things you would need to be able to do to fix up a broken system. Puppy can also be installed onto a small partition. The install process is fairly easy.
You can use it to make a full backup image of your main system onto a USB hard drive. It is a good way to do a full backup.
It's now out, at least in a developement version. Although for example in Fedora 11 it installs as a menu entry in old grub, not as a primary bootloader. It has the interesting feature that it can boot iso images from hard disk. This is not as useful as one might like though, since it only works if the stuff inside the iso in question is smart enough to find itself... I.e. it knows look for files inside the iso image.
So booting grml (Debian based small live Linux) from an iso image with the right boot options works, anything else is a definite maybe.
Well, there's checkinstall for .deb packages and Autopackage for a more general solution. I've never used them so I don't know if it's easy or hard. I usually install non-packaged stuff from source using stow to have a way to uninstall stuff too.
It's also very dangerous, since gzip files are extra fragile. Personally, I like to create a little reed-solomon error correction data for my image backups with par2. I doubt Ghost provides anything comparable but don't really know.
On the other hand, Partimage (and PING, a Linux distribution oriented towards providing an alternative to Ghost with Partimage and other tools) knows how to copy just the occupied sectors, on ext3 and others, but NTFS support is experimental. Then again, ntfsclone does the same thing for NTFS.
On a sunny day (Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:08:21 +0200) it happened Anssi Saari wrote in :
Diskspace is so cheap these days, I just use cp. When copying an image it is always 'fragile' in the sense that errors may have far reaching effects. That said, I have not seen a data error that I did not cause myself on my disk systems in about 9 years. Data errors stick out on a 3 GB mpeg... Seagate harddisks, Verbatim DVDs, Tyan mobo, what more can you want. System up 24/7.
On a sunny day (Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:08:21 +0200) it happened Anssi Saari wrote in :
PS To make a backup of my Linux systems I actually use tar. So I start fro man otehr lInux (that could be live disk, but normally an other hd), and then mount tha tsystem, then use tar -cvf on it. the advantage is that you can do tar -xvf with that archive on an other filesystem. Also teh archive is smaller, and all dependencies and links and timestamps are perfectly reproduced.
For programming I do have a script that backs up the stuff in each project directory.
3 backups minimal exists, one on internal disk, one on external disk, and one on FLASH (USB stick). If you do that every day your work is always safe.
Also I have scripts to release GPL software that simply makes .tgz files, archives the versions locally, the tgz files have makefile.am and configure.ac normally. With a hundred or so programs out there, each with maybe 10 versions or more or less, means a thousand versions on disk.... and in the 'wild'. never had a problem. No rpm or deb for me :-)
People just do tar -zxvf some_program-2.3.tgz cd some program-2.3 ./configure make make install
If they do not have the required libs, they should get them :-) (To be fair I usually tell them in the INSTALL what is needed).
And that is exactly where Norton Ghost excels. It is blazingly fast since it bypasses the OS and uses a clever compression algorithm. Even huge disks take only a few minutes. Not to mention partition resizing (cp can't do that). I never saw anyone using a knoppix CD and cp. I saw a lot of people using Norton Ghost. So what is the sensible choice?
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
"If it doesn\'t fit, use a bigger hammer!"
--------------------------------------------------------------
Note the 'several machines'. I'm beginning to think it may have something to do with the language / spell checker. After all Dutch is the most complicated language on earth.
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
"If it doesn\'t fit, use a bigger hammer!"
--------------------------------------------------------------
Is there a means to "mount" a .gzip file? (E.g., z GZIP_FS, kinda like SMBFS?)
I remember many years ago, under DOS, there was a driver that would let you assign a drive letter to a .zip file; pretty slick idea. (It might have been read-only, though...)
On a sunny day (Fri, 4 Dec 2009 10:04:09 -0800) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :
Mount requires a filesystem, but a zipped archive, even if it was, or had, a filesystem in it, would be scrambled, mount would not know what to do with it.
On a sunny day (Fri, 4 Dec 2009 10:04:09 -0800) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :
Mount requires a filesystem, but a zipped archive, even if it was, or had, a filesystem in it, would be scrambled, mount would not know what to do with it.
PS There is however 'cramfs', a compressed filesyste,m, I have used it on the linksys, basically it is read only, this is from the kern docs in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems :
Cramfs - cram a filesystem onto a small ROM
cramfs is designed to be simple and small, and to compress things well.
It uses the zlib routines to compress a file one page at a time, and allows random page access. The meta-data is not compressed, but is expressed in a very terse representation to make it use much less diskspace than traditional filesystems. You can't write to a cramfs filesystem (making it compressible and compact also makes it _very_ hard to update on-the-fly), so you have to create the disk image with the "mkcramfs" utility.
Well, that's why I put mount in parentheses -- clearly you need a GZip filesystem driver... but apparently such a utility doesn't exist. Same idea as the CramFS information you posted... (which, as I say, I've seen available for regular old .Zip files on DOS at least a decade back now).
I also meant to add... have you used SMBFS? I set up an Xubuntu machine last year (a low-end netbook... Atom CPU and all of 16GB of SSD), and it worked quite nicely -- seemed better that installing KDE or Gnome or one of the other heavier-weight desktops that can natively "do the right thing" with Samba shares.
On a sunny day (Fri, 4 Dec 2009 12:10:31 -0800) it happened "Joel Koltner" wrote in :
I really do not know what SMBFS is, no have not used it. I am running ext2 on the SDcards now. If I want a lot of memory on the eeePC I just plug in the 1TB Seageta USB disk. I use neither KDE nor Gnome, Qt4 is way to big, and I do not really like gnome. Just have X, with a very old fvwm, and 9 virtual desktops, xfm filemanager in one desktop with icons, all others have a rxvt in it. I build all my GUI apps with xforms, or some older ones directly with xlib.
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