Anyone who has read any of my previous messages knows that i LOVE MCNL and think chris borders on genius for all the work and thought she has put in.

but rarely being satisfied with the status quo, I wanted to take it to another level.

what i wanted was to be able to load MY personalized version of MDV on a specific drive/partition.

put all my data on another drive/partition.

AND have the ability to reroll/remaster my pc into an image that A) I can take anywhere and use like a LIVE Distro and if anything happens to my home pc (I have a toddler, THINGS happen) I can pop in a dvd and zap it back in place!

I started with MCNL and was loving life, and then found out that i couldnt easily upgrade to spring.

So then I started the laborius process of building my own, and Chris has been VERY patiently trying to get me to understand how the magic happens, but here is something that I missed, even though it was pointed out to me.

When you allow MDV to do a standard install, it creates a '\' partition of about 3 GB.

Which for me, just BARELY has enough room for my base OS, plus all my crap.

So that when I roll my own, if I DONT redirect the resulting image, I DONT HAVE ENOUGH ROOM.

Regardless of how much room I may have AVAILABLE, if theres no room on '\' the defaults arent going to work!

So I reinstalled, gave my '\' 50GB (out of 320gb), and did a pretty basic setup.

WHOO HOO IT WORKS!!!!! I now have a 1GB live dvd of my home PC!!!!!

NOW comes the fun part. building the PC into what, for me, is a usable pc.

THAT WILL take some time, however in Chris's instructions for rolling your own, she says that if you want the MCNL custom scripts you need to 'just copy them over'

HUH? ok so I'm a little dense, I ran each menu item, and they all seemed to be pointing to \usr\local\bin

So what I have done so far is copy EVERYTHING from that DIR onto my handy dandy USB stick and tonite I plan on copying them BACK to my master system.

HWEVER, before I do that I would like to verify that I'm doing something useful. Here is what I have copied from Toronto:

BACKUP-RESTORE
MBR.BIN
MKMCNLIVE
MKMCNLIVE-LOOP
MKREMASTER-ADVANCED
MKREMASTER-SIMPLE
SPLASH.MSG
SYSLINUX.CFG

(please ignore the caps, thats just so they stand out)

The majority of these are pretty straight forward, but if anyone would like to point out any fallacy in my idea i would GREATLY appreciate it.

I have used a LOT of different distros, but I must say the help available for MDV, and MCNL specifrically really is top notch.

thanks to everyone who responds, or even takes a minute (or 3 ) to read this.

Congrats.

Yes, when you make the basic installation, you better do a custom partitioning, with only one / - I thought that I had this tip in the howto.

For the custom scripts. All the files you find on Toronto, in the dir: /usr/local/bin
---> you would copy all these files to the same dir /usr/local/bin on your HD installed system.

(and you need to install some rpm's to be able to use these scriptys. It is written in the howto)

And you need the draklive-install -- also in the howto.

The menu entries - you need to create manually.

btw: I am a pretty normal person, and an average MDV user. If you ever come to Europe and Amsterdam, it would be a pleasure to meet you - you would notice how normal I am. (except maybe that I speak 4 languages, but in Europe this is also quite normal).

yep so far everything you mentioned is in the HOWTO's BUT, and maybe it's just me.

I never made the connection between the size of my '\' paertition and what I was actually trying to accomplish. I know, it SHOULD be a given, but sometimes I need things spelled out.

As for the RPM's, if they were in the howto's I have them along with draklive-install (that one I remember)

as for you being normal, thats a matter of opinion. One of my longest lasting relationships was with a girl who moved over from Sweden in her 10th grade year (we dated for 10 years). And back THEN, the affinity for languages was a given, hers were french,swedish,spanish and english as well as more of an appreciation for Art.

However technically there was a HUGE gap (early 80's), and that I believe is where you excel.

you've found a project that interests you, a need that was looking for a resolution, and jumped in with both feet!

plus theres always the patience factor.

I have complained, several times, about mandrivas lack of a root login in their GUI.

now although you dont approve of it, you make one statement and move on, if you want a laugh read the 3 (maybe more by now) pages that went on the LAST time I made that statement, OY VEY. Instead of saying "thats a bad idea, heres a betteer one" there is line after line after line of just amazing ranting.

THEN someone says "hey why dont you try this!"

I did, it worked, and I may not ever need to ask that question again.

thanks for everything I'll keep everyone updated!

LOL to the "log in as root" stuff. When I say this, I usually put a smiley to it. I believe that linux users should have the freedom to .... In this case, using the mklivecd command -- it is easier for me to find out what is going wrong, when you don't login 'graphically' as root

Keep us posted, please.

well to paraphrase, "after the bragging comes the fall"

last night I went home, changed my monitor and desktop resolution, moved some of my icons and ran a few updates.

then I went to run my konsole and I got an error (sorry dont remember it), that indicated that it couldnt be found?

So I went back to the menu/systems and NO KONSOLE listed?

so i tried a few more links on my desktop, again indications of "not found", nor were they on the menu any longer.

so just for grins I thought maybe a reboot would help.

NOW in my grub menu I had 4 selections instead of 2.

Mandriva Spring
Mandriva Spring SAFE MODE
LINUX (with 1 specific kernal reference number)
LINUX (with a newer kernal reference number)

and NONE of them would allow me to get into my GUI, in ANY account (I create 3 by defaukt)

Neither could i recreate any accounts without the GUI (again errors not copied)

SO out came the DVD, complete reinstall, then this morning I got the REMASTERING software all installed in about 5 minutes.

So ONE good thing came out of it, I am getting faster at integrating the MCNL goodies.

Hopefully that WONT happen again this ever=ning and I can actually get something productive done.....

ok, this weekend the AC went out, so I didnt have much time to work. When it's 97 outside its at LEAST 94 inside and I have found that seat and PC's just DONT mix.

however I did get the chance to run through the scripts that I copied over last week, and they are really very nice.

however I am missing something, and I'm sure I'M missing it.

As explained above the goal for me, although multi tiered, involves creating a COMPLETE rescue CD.

In otherwords I have my pc installed exactly the way i want and everything runs JUST the way it should.

Then I install the many neat and cool tricks from MCNLand I have the same abilities that I do ion MCNL, I can boot a LIVECD, install to a USB stick (ok a BIG one, since my image is 1.3GB), but ALSO, in case my primary desktop crashes, or I upgrade the MB/CPU, which I do about every 6 months (looking forward to an AMD 6GHZ X2 next), or in case of a cetstophic failure, be able to boot from the DVD and just reinstall back over the top of WHATEVER is there.

Having followed everything I can find in the HOTO (and I admit I have thus far mised a few things), I APPEAR to be missing the ability to reinstall from my DVD to a HD.

Obviously I havent created the menu entries for the scripts I have copied (that whole TIME thing) but I will, so I guess my question is, was that a customer script that I missed, or is there a switch from one of the ones I have, that I'm missing.

Any ideas would be agreatly appreciated.

Thanks

J

Yeah, you missed this:



Step by step:

Step one:



This will install the original MDV draklive-install script. And all the dependencies. This script won't work on MCNLive.
That's why:

Step two:

Copy as root from Toronto the single file draklive-install (it is in /usr/sbin) to the same directory on your HD, thus overwrite it.

Step three.
Create a menu entry. Depends on your desktop that you use. I have no idea how to do this with gnome.
In KDE, right click the 'start' or whatever button, --> Menu editor.
The command to start draklive-install is: /usr/sbin/draklive-install

Some more hints:
- do all installations, updates etc before you add all the scripts. Otherwise some updates will overwrite the scripts.
- never run automatic updates. it will pull in stuff that will break the mklivecd scripts (see the howto for more info)
- if you upgrade your hardware to very new stuff, it is not 100% that the new hardware is configured properly. MCNLive is now with a kernel and drivers made some months ago. That is OLD . Some motherboards won't work, for example the Intel p33/35 that are in the new Dell Inspiron 530 serie, they need a newer kernel or some kernel arguments (all-ide-generic irqpoll pci=nommconf) to even start from CD.
- if you want a Live DVD/CD that works on many different systems, don't install ANY proprietary graphic drivers, thus no propr. nvidia and ati drivers. But add all xorg-video drivers you can find.

ok, just took a sec to load toronto on my laptop at work.

so the cript i want for the HD install is draklive-install right?

thanks to anyone who can confirm or deny

j

excellent ideas.

i had everything down except the toronto draklive copied over thanks.

would you mind reviewing a file I'm writing (a longer step by step how to) for a cass being taught here in orlando?

i'm just supplying the docs for it, i just want to make sure i', not saying anything blatently wrong.

thanks for your help

j

That's fine. Just send it to: mcnlive AT googlemail DOT com

Or post the text here if it is not too large.