This little demon was surfin' the web for Mandrake related goodies and happened to discover:
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mklivecd <-----
Project Page,
CVS Download Page,
Screenshots,
Mailing Lists (https) ,
Mailing Lists (http), (and the
original page I found which has detailed info on cvs (but is it up to date? may or may not be more up to date than the cvs download page linked to above, I didn't check)
So.... this looks very interesting.. I haven't downloaded any of the files or tried this mklivecd program yet.. but it does look like something that would be fun to whip up my own livecd custom distros for friends and family to introduce them to Linux. I tried doing a "urpmi mklivecd" and sure enough it tried to download an old version of mklivecd, so I'm going to try the cvs version instead since there's rpms for it available. I hope this works with Mandrake 10 Official and kernel 2.6!
What say you, fellow Mandrake users?
Anyone interested in this? Anyone use this to make their own LiveCD?
Let us know!
Edit: Oh, and here's a quote from their about page:
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"
i n t r o
The LiveCD project is dedicated to providing you with tools to create your own LiveCD from a currently installed Linux distribution. It can be used to create your own distribution, specialised CD or to put together a demo disk to show off the power of our favourite OS.
f e a t u r e s
The project features automatic hardware detection and setup and utilises compression technology to build a LiveCD from a partition much larger to typically fit on a CD. (Up to 2GB for a normal 650MB CD.) When booting from this LiveCD, the data is transparently decompressed as needed.
Currently only Mandrake Linux 9.2+ is supported as a host for creation of the LiveCD, i.e. we are only able to create LivceCD's from a MDK install."
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So it sounds like the program/scripts/whatever they use uses the compression scheme similar to Knoppix's liveCD? If so, that sounds AWESOME! I could really put together a cool Mandrake liveCD!
Edit #2: Looks like the author of this mklivecd program has another page for a LiveCD he made (using the program mklivecd I assume):
MiniCD. In his forums on the MiniCD site he posts an answer to the question:
===> "I was wondering what kind of compression are you getting when mastering the CDs?"
===>"See for yourself:
[jaco@localhost minicd]$ ls -al mdkimg.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 188300602 Mar 16 13:31 mdkimg.clp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 435879936 Mar 16 13:24 mdkimg.iso
That is with a "gzip -9" type compression. (Basically the same as used in Knoppix.) What I am also working on (yes, I have way, way, way too many side-projects) is a bzip2-type compression modules. Instead of cloop I guess the kernel module will be called bzloop. I would love to see what that does and what the performance (decompression) penalty would be - if any.
Greetings,
Jaco"
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Hmmm... Well now.... sounds fun.
Of course that quote is dated March of 2003 but the latest cvs rpm's are dated Nov 2003 or so and the cvs src page has files which are as recent as a few weeks ago... so the above quote is probably way out of date.. Just wanted to post this info for discussion.
Edit #3:Haven't tried cvs yet for this but from
this post on the mailing list it appears there's a newer version of mklivecd as recent as June, maybe newer.
Disclaimer: I am not the author of mklivecd or minicd or any of the pages linked to above. Quotes are listed here as they appear at the source(s) : therefore all spelling errors in each belong to the author(s) of said quotes.