Which will be avalaible next month.

E-Mail Me: If your got any questions, and get regular updates, please E-Mail me on djdave09@gmail.com.

Any ideas?

PS it would be great if it's packaged as RPM. I'm not great with the command line or with tarballs. SO not with tarballs.

I'm a crewmember of the Dutch Mandriva Club, and have been involved with MCNLive a bit in the past few releases (I am the creator of the graphical remaster script for instance).

Now, with Chris gone MCNLive can simply be declared dead... :(

Problem is, we have no-one who really understands the mklivecd scripts, and the Mandriva boot process for that matter. We have a few people (including myself) on the MCNL board that understand how to create a live cd with the help of a working mklivecd script, but simply no-one who can update the mklivecd that much that it will work for MDV2008.x/2009.x again.

This really gives an idea how much knowledge Chris had (or still has) about the whole kernel and boot process.

I have tried to build a live cd from a Mandriva 2008.0 and 2008.1 system, but failed miserably... since this already have cost me a lot of time, I decided to stop trying. I'd love to see a new MCNLive again... but I simply can't do it as I don't have all of Chris' knowledge. Besides that it seemed as if I was the only one even trying, which was very frustrating... I now understand how Chris must have felt, doing things all by herself.

Now, with the upcoming 2009.0 release, I figured it would be very cool to have a working live cd again. Not like One, but like the 'old' MCNLive. MCNLive was by far superior to One, as it has much more features (think about creating remasters, copy2ram, etc.). Problem is I still don't understand enough about the boot process to deal with this myself, and I just don't have enough spare time to figure it out myself. But without this 'base', we simply cannot continue.

So the actual question here is: Is there anyone who has managed to create a live cd off of a Mandriva 2008.x system, that wishes to share his or her knowledge with us? :)

These are the basic steps to start from a clean Mandriva 2007.1 Spring installation and make it ready to build a live cd out of it with the mklivecd scripts. This works only with 2007.1, not with an earlier version, not with cooker.

You need the MCNLive Toronto CD in order to copy some files.

* Install 2007.1 Spring on one / partition, no extra /home partition. A swap partition is handy. Be sure you have installed all drakxtools and drakconf (the MCC). The drakxtools take care of the hardware detection. Be sure to install the standard kernel or the standard legacy kernel, or the official updated kernel. A kernel from contrib won't work.

* Add the software sources main and contrib

* urpmi mklivecd

(this will install the broken mklivecd scripts from /contrib and install all dependencies.)

* Replace all mklivecd scripts, just copy those from Toronto over to your installed system: :

/usr/sbin/mklivecd

/usr/sbin/hwdetect

/usr/share/mklivecd/*

* Copy /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt from Toronto to your installed system

* Install draklive-install and replace the draklive-install script with the one from Toronto

* Download this syslinux packagage and install it:

http://home.tiscali.nl/berenstraat/mcnl/sy...2007.1.i586.rpm

(it is a non-patched syslinux package with the vesa menu feature)

* Copy the file /usr/lib/syslinux/flash.jpg from Toronto to the main /usr/lib/syslinux/

or create your own isolinux boot background, it is a normal 640x480 jpg file.

* If you want the special MCNLive scripts then copy everything from /usr/local/bin over, and install the dependencies: zenity, bc

Edit /etc/mtools.conf and add:

MTOOLS_SKIP_CHECK=1

To create an iso start a terminal window, su to root and run: mklivecd myown.iso

More options for mklivecd: mklivecd --help

The whole shebang how to use mklivecd, also with older Mandrake/Mandriva versions:

www.mcnlive.org/howto_en.htm.

First, let me just say a big Thank You to Kris and mandrivaclub.nl for the outstanding

piece of art that is MCNLive. You made a self replicating Live CD that is simply unparalleled as

far as ease of use.

I have three questions.

1. Is it possible to change the boot splash screens using the LiveCD self replicating method?

Or, do I need to use the "Install Mandriva 2007.1" method?

(I mean the initial syslinux splash screen that says "Mandrivaclub.nl" and the semi-transparent "Mandriva 2007 Spring Free" splash screen) I tried the built in tools in drakconf, but I'm guessing they were designed for HDD installs.

2. How small does my install need to be before compression to squashfs, so that it fits on a CD or 512 MB JD?

3. I want to give everyone proper credit for their work, but also want it to visually represent what I'm trying to do. Including

adding some of my own boot instructions.

Can I use your newly created logos as part of my new splash screens and in the Documentation?

(What I'm going for is "My Rescue CD, Powered by MCNLive, with Special Thanks to Mandrivaclub.nl")

P.S.On a side note, in the "Install Mandriva 2007.1 method" of using mklivecd, you say to copy scripts, but do not give a list of files to be copied. I am pretty sure I can figure this out on my own, but I'm guessing that question will come up.

http://home.tiscali.nl/berenstraat/newmenu.jpg

Much easier than the ugly gfxboot suse/novell patch :-)

Found it on the new Fedora live and the syslinux site. Using the plain isolinux.bin with a vesamenu, and a 640x480 jpg file as background.

The normal isolinux.cfg is all that is needed as config.

MDV did it again and preferred a patched syslinux package instead of using the unpatched syslinux/isolinux. And they don't ship the vesamenu.c32 in their rpm.

The fedora ones do work, though, even on a mdv 2007.1 system :-)

I've just burned the Toronto CD and made a USB bootable stick - works as advertised - fantastic

One little suggestion since I'm still a little bit new to Linux and very used to everything being graphical - could the same boot options box be present on the Live USB as are shown when booting from the CD? - Maybe on the next version. I find that the new 'vesa' code is very useful - there seem to be alot of Nvidea video cards that don't work well with the default drivers, but seem to work fine with vesa :D

This would make it even easier when booting the Live USB on a 'strange' machine

Thanks for a great version!!

Grogerf

Edit

Sorry folks - looks like I've posted this on the wrong part of the forum. Perhaps it could be moved to the correct place by a moderator - Please?

Which features do you miss in MCNLive?

What can be improved?

What would you change?

Anything you know from other live systems that you would like to see?

Let us know ...

ATM we are: HighKing (Michel), Maurice (Mauricio), korrel (Marco, the rpm packager), PeterM (Peter, design), a bunch of testers - they are all active on mandrivaclub.nl.

And me, I am here :-)

I noticed your info/help for ISO downloading. You can use metalinks which list your mirrors and checksums for a file in an XML format used by download programs. aria2 is a really good CLI client, but there are other on Mac and Windows, so anyone can get your ISOs easier. This also contains repair info, so downloads with errors can be fixed.

Here are metalinks for 2 of your ISOs. I can make them for the others, if you're interested in using them.

http://www.metalinker.org/samples.html#mcnlive

ftp://ftp.belnet.be/pub/mirror/urpmidev.m...cnlive/Toronto/

From the release notes:

20-05-2007 MCNLive Toronto, 466,4 MB

md5sum:

a0ad35c4d311828c9a9a564f6fb69697 MCNLive-Toronto.iso

 

Toronto has the same code base as Delft -- with additional applications included and some (minor) fixes.

 

Additional packages:

VirtualBox OSE, KOffice Suite, Gimp, Gthumb, Gxine, Gftp, Bluefish, Quanta, kaudiocreator, Kopete, kdebluetooth-pin, bunch of networking tools and printer packages ...

 

ENGLISH only edition !

To use the copy2ram option you need at least 768 MB RAM.

 

Improved isolinux bootsplash, with keyboard navigation to select a boot option

 

Different wallpapers

 

Fixed:

* (non-critical) error messages when shutting down the system in livecd persist mode

How it looks:

www.mcnlive.org/toronto/index.html

There should not be any serious issues or bugs B)

But it would be nice to have some feedback before I declare it final and announce it officially.

--chris