For what it's worth, I just wrote a little script that shows how to generate a bootable ext2 floppy using grub and genext2fs without being root.
I wrote this mostly because Thierry Larode and Robert Milan's mkbimage script,
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requires root privs, and I wanted to show that there is no need for root privs (or 'fakeroot') to make a bootdisk, at least for ext2.
It was fun to write, once the pain stopped. Took me a long time to figure out a few things:
1) you have to enable EXT2 support when building the kernel :-) 2) you have to disable initrd support when building the kernel, or it'll prompt you for a second floppy 3) you have to say root=/dev/fd0 on the kernel commandline instead of root=fd0, which gets misinterpreted as a hexadecimal major/minor device number (!). 4) genext2fs seems to have an off-by-one error; if you ask it to generate a 1440KB image, the resulting disk image doesn't *quite* fit on a floppy: $ dd if=mkb.out of=/dev/fd0 bs=1 dd: writing `/dev/fd0': No space left on device 1474561+0 records in 1474560+0 records out (I guess I'll have a look at that sometime.) The disk booted anyway, so I guess nothing critical is on that last sector.While writing this, I found the recipes at
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helpful. Also, reading linux/init/do_mounts.c helped.
- Dan