[Debian] Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

So, as some of you may have seen I've made a .deb based fanoush-boot menu installer that has support for /etc/bootmenu.d/*.item configuration (so you dont have to hand write full bootmenu.conf's anymore, and installers can put in .item's that will appear on boot menu after refresh_bootmenu.d).

I've also worked on a more GUIish Deblet installer, and I'm interested in having people test this obviously and share their experiences as I don't have a Diablo installation at home and can't test on there.

These .install files require either becomeroot or rootsh (making sudo gainroot possible):

http://trac.tspre.org/svn/deblet/tru...hinook.install <- for Chinook

http://trac.tspre.org/svn/deblet/tru...diablo.install <- for Diablo

This will drag in dependancies for the installer such as cfdisk, debootstrap, python, roxterm, zenity etc, and the boot menu installer. It will also use Diablo extras and a deblet repository (on diablo), and the usual bunch of repos in Chinook.

This will produce two icons in Utilities, "Install Bootmenu" and "Install Deblet". Install Bootmenu will start the initfs flasher in a terminal and guide you through it. It is important that you say yes to cleaning out stuff for more space, and say yes to including bootmenu.conf

WARNING: You should either have a clean initfs before installing bootmenu or have fanoush's bootmenu installed (we've seen trouble with penguinbait initfs?)

If you have other bootable systems, you can set them up by putting a /etc/bootmenu.d/some.item of this form:
/etc/bootmenu.d/*.items are on this form:

ITEM_NAME="Deblet" # Name of entry
ITEM_ID="deblet" # id if you want to autoboot sometime to this
ITEM_DEVICE="mmcblk1p2" # partition the fs is on
ITEM_MODULES="mbcache jbd ext3" # modules needed to be loaded to mount filesystem
ITEM_FSTYPE="ext3" # filesystem type
ITEM_FSOPTIONS="noatime,ro" # filesystem mount options
ITEM_LINUXRC="linuxrc.mine" # OPTIONAL. Will boot using /linuxrc.mine on the partition instead of using the usual Maemo initfs boot method (will break on non-linuxrc systems like Maemo)

It is important not to have ITEM_LINUXRC line if you use Maemo :)

To refresh the boot menu items, run refresh_bootmenu.d afterwards (will require reboot)

If anyone have the guts to try, they can try out running the Install Deblet as well. I've done my best to make it properly viewable on tablet screen without too many issues. I'd love some comments on how far you get, especially with the diablo .install, since it's not obvious if something is wrong with it. Deblet installer automatically adds a bootmenu item at the end of the install (remember to install bootmenu first!)

Thanks to fatalsaint for trying this out as a guinea pig at first, and thanks in advance to anyone else willing to try this out.

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Go on, you know you want to change the depends line from:

Depends: bootmenu, python2.5, wget, binutils, libslang2, e2fsprogs, libreadline5, libncurses5, ncurses-base, debootstrap, zenity, cfdisk, roxterm

to

Depends: bootmenu, python2.5, wget, binutils, libslang2, e2fsprogs, libreadline5, libncurses5, ncurses-base, debootstrap, zenity, cfdisk, roxterm, rootsh | becomeroot | easyroot | GodMode

:P

(Yes, there is a GodMode package, I didn't know about it at the time I uploaded rootsh or I would have set a conflict with GodMode too)

Anyway, great work, look forward to trying it out when my charger arrives :)

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Would this actually pull in rootsh if none of the others exist?

Oh, and thanks very much for the roxterm port :) Only thing i have a problem with it's impossible to do Ctrl-something with on screen keyboard :> But i removed that part of install

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Yeah, that's how the | works, it wants either one of those packages.

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Done and regenerated :)

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Well, I don't want to stop or slow down anyone, you can of course reuse bootmenu code as you wish :-) Here are just few random comments:

- with deb package one doesn't need sudo gainroot, you can modify sudoers and get rid of the hack

- it may be good to have basic bootmenu flasher deb with no dependencies on gui stuff and python (actually with no dependency at all if possible), the gui can be separate deb for those who really need it EDIT: oh, the deblet gui installer is separate so disregard this

- current code with merging ITEM_WHATEVER is hardcoded in the script, this can be made generic by not including it directly via '.' but parsing/evaluating it to rewrite any 'WHATEVER=xxx' line automatically into MENU_X_WHATEVER=xxx line

- would be nice to modularize both support for different versions of initfs (devices, firmwares) and also optional features (dropbear, telnet, framebuffer console, in future also some advance recovery tools in initfs) current way of including everything inside is not ideal. Also patching Nokia linuxrc should be done differently, currently full modified linuxrc is stored for each different firmware. This could allow autopatching unknown new firmware.

- merging final bootmenu.conf can be done already in flasher, not at boot time (for speed and smaller initfs runtime code with less bugs, bugs at boot time are nasty), those parts can be still kept separate (in initfs) for future merging. Still some on the fly modification when already booted into menu would be nice too, so maybe the merging could stay in initfs too but not in normal execution path.

- I'd like to keep simple .tar.gz format too, some people prefer it, sometimes you don't have system with full debian installed or you don't want to mess with repositories so the code should be written to be both buildable into deb with /var /lib /bin /etc paths and one directory

So these are things I have planned. I certainly cannot tell people what they should do but if you want to help with some of those ideas instead of doing yet another quick bootmenu flasher hack, it would be nice ;-)

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Ah - I think you're thinking that my deb package installs right away -it doesn't, it has a icon that runs it using osso-xterm -e /usr/sbin/install_bootmenu - which isn't run as root. I agree modifying sudoers could work too, but you also have the sudo gainroot hack in initfs_flash which is why I decided on this solution

The bootmenu.deb has no dependancies - it even uses osso-xterm -e, it's just the deblet installer that has them.

Yeah, that's also a possibility - I took the current solution due to the simplicity and that it's easy to understand what goes on. It's all a matter of how to implement it :)

Indeed - One possibility that the _linuxrc setting has is that since it avoids using Maemo boot, .. think ext2.img file systems on fat fs MMC including optional features. Think LINUXRC="/dropbear/dropbear.linuxrc" that starts it up by mounting /dropbear/dropbear.img on the fat system and starting the dropbear file inside it..


I have no direct preference on how to do it - i'm happy as long as there's a /etc/bootmenu.d/*.item thing that refresh_bootmenu.d refreshes initfs boot menu using.

Yeah, there's nothing to stop you really from doing tar.gz's as such - I just did this modification to make things easier and more "deb" like - should obviously have both possibilities and share same code base


My intent has been all along as it to be patches for your bootmenu - I have no interest in maintaining bootmenu software - so I'm all ears on how to change things to improve upon your bootmenu and maybe include in the more "official" distribution - I've used your bootmenu for a long time myself and find it immensely useful. :)

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Yes, it is not that important. The hack is there because most people who can unpack tgz have sudo gainroot working. For deb such additional dependency on easyroot just because of this hack is not needed.

I was more thinking about modularity at install time - flasher can discover installed extensions (where core bootmenu that patches Nokia linuxrc is one of them) and can call into them when creating jffs2 image to have custom jffs2 with selected tools. At runtime it adds complexity. Still for bigger things this may be possible too but you can as well consider such custom image as full rootfs and boot into it so I was more thinking about smaller things that can fit into initfs directly.

Great :-) So what we need is
-place to share code and ideas, there is http://bootmenu.garage.maemo.org/ with svn, task tracker etc
- implement code to build the deb (or .tgz)
- improve code for the flasher and extensions
- improve code that runs in initfs

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

Ah, it's because I have a fancy icon for the bootmenu i need it ;)

Is http://trac.tspre.org/bootmenu.src.tar.gz good enough for importing into SVN as a foundation? .deb is built using the tar.gz/source (build-deb script). Needs a working dpkg-deb to actually make the deb, which is not on maemo but prolly is on scratchbox.. I usually just do the dpkg-deb part in Debian chroot.

Fair warning though - I didn't check if the script works properly after adding $TOOLS_LOCATION and stuff, but i checked deb making works

Re: Alpha(?) testing of new Deblet installer and Bootmenu installer.
 

I have diablo, and i am now running deblet installer. That .install file adds needed repositories, but after that it says that deblet-installer package is missing, so i need run "apt-get install deblet-installer" on xterm.

This new installer is really good. cfdisk has newer worked with my external memory-card, but this new installer does not stop if cfdisk shows fatal error. I am debootstrapping right now. I will post more later...