Phydeaux

Hi tiorba,

I have a similar situation with my own setup. MCNL, while running in live mode, will mount all disks (although ntfs disks/partitions are mounted read only), but once installed to hard disk will only mount its own disks/partitions. If you wish to mount any other disks or partitions, you have to do it manually using the "mount" command from a terminal window. If your windows disk is /dev/hdb1 and formatted FAT32 you could try:

You should then be able to access your windows disk by typing "cd /mnt" from the command line, or by double-clicking on the "Devices" icon on your desktop and open your disk from there and selecting the folder "/mnt".

Regards, Phydeaux.

After teaching a class in networking where I had run a custom designed, forms-based self-assessment system, running through a web interface and backed into a MySQL database, I had a need to present this data to "the powers" above me.

I looked at various options and settled on the live-cd as a means of presenting this data. But found that what was available didn't suit my requirements. In my search for solutions, I came across MCNLive and, although it didn't have any of the applications I needed for my particular purposes, it was the perfect base on which to build what I needed.

After trying to (unsuccessfully) get the Apache server working properly, I switched tactics and went for a 3rd party solution with XAMPP. This solved my problem and allowed me to continue to create what I needed.

I have to give full credit to chris b. for her work on these scripts and I also acknowledge bookie and mindwave for their work in getting the scripts to work from an installed Mandriva Linux (yes bookie, I was wrong, those notes you sent turned out to be very helpful after all ;) ).

So, in the true spirit of the open source community, I present Fido-X Web, a totally new live web server/development environment combining Mandriva Linux, XAMPP and MCNLive scripts.

This is still under development, and the documentation is incomplete (I'm still writing it) but, it works! I'm making it available so that I can continue to develop this project.

You can get it at http://www.fido-x.net/.

Let me know what you think of it. Let me know what it needs. Available in English only, but other languages could probably be included in a later release.

Regards, Phydeaux.

I would suggest that the problem lies in the fact that you are working with a read-only file system, both on your USB (where you have your running live distro) AND the mounted hard disk(s).

You need to unmount "/mnt/win_d" ("umount /mnt/win_d"), then remount it as a read-write filesystem ("mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hdb1 /mnt/win_d"). I am assuming that "win_d" is a second hard disk and is ntfs formatted, if it is a second partition on your C: drive then replace "hdb1" with "hda2". This should enable you to write data to "win_d".

Regards, Phydeaux.

Hi guys, thought I'd have another say on this issue. I've pleased to report that I've had some measure of success with my project, although not in the manner I had envisaged. My project required setting up an Apache web service on the live-cd, however, I have found (through trying various methods) that I can't get the web server to serve images, style or interpret javascript, so in the end, I gave up on this method and used XAMPP for Linux instead (as used in distro's such as Lamppix and Slampp) and this solved my problem.

As for the methods I used - I tried with the MCNL Toronto release and, using this as a basis, I was able to build my live-cd with everything working properly (with the exception of Apache), but, since this release doesn't include most of the software that I needed, I decided to use the Spring release of Mandriva One 2007.1 (since this includes all the necessary office software that I needed) and followed the instructions that bookie and mindwave worked out and was able to build a working live-cd. However, I still had the same problems with Apache.

I even tried using Mandriva 2008 for this project, but found a number of problems with this approach (more work needs to be done here, I think ;) ). The biggest problem in using 2008 as a basis is that the "insmod" program (which checks and loads the kernel modules) is actually called "insmod" while in the 2007.1 (and MCNL) releases it is called "insmod-25" (for some unknown reason). To get around this I created a symbolic link to "insmod-25". this got around the major problem and actually built the iso, but it didn't boot properly.

When I've finished the particular project that I am currently working on, I might have another look at 2008 and see what I can do.

Regards, Phydeaux.

Hi bookie.

Email's fine, or attach it here (unless it's too big ;) ). Sorry to hear about the back.

Regards, Phydeaux.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your responses. I have had some success in my project by two different methods.

(1) Using a computer with significantly more memory than that which I was using, I was able to install/uninstall everything that I wanted in one pass (running from the live-cd) to remaster the live-cd on the fly.

(2) By installing to the hard disk (from MCNLive CD) and installing/uninstalling everything that I want, then reboot from MCNLive CD and remaster "on-the-fly" from the command line passing "--root=/mnt/hda1" to the mklivecd script.

In answer to Highking's question regarding which kernel I am using, the answer is - the same kernel that is provided with the MCNLive Toronto release. While running in "live" mode, the kernel supports squashfs, but once installed to the hard disk - it doesn't. Try it yourself - boot from MCNLive, open a terminal, type "cat /proc/filesystems" and you will find that you have support for squashfs. Then install to hard disk from MCNLive, boot from your newly installed MCN system, open a terminal and type "cat /proc/filesystems" and you will find squashfs is not supported. Why does this happen? I don't have an answer.

As for the error that I get. If I try to run the mklivecd script from my hard-disk installed MCN, it goes through the process of creating the compressed filesystem, after which the script does a "chmod 644" on the compressed image that has just been created. At this stage I get "file not found" error. This error occurs because the kernel that has been installed by the MCNLive install process does not have squashfs support, subsequently, after creating the compressed filesystem, it gets deleted.

On to Bookie. It looks like you and Mindwave have done a lot of work already. Yes, a to do list would be very handy. What I have been able to achieve, is to get OpenOffice installed (I needed something that was compatible with that other company's office software and I don't know whether koffice is or not). I also needed a web server with database integration, and to do this, I installed Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is where I am having problems (I am aware that MCNLive is intended to be a desktop and not a server, but I need both for this particular project). While the Apache server starts up OK and runs perfectly from hard-disk, after creating a live-cd (or live-usb) of this hard-disk install, for some reason the Apache server no longer supports javascript or style sheets. It's probably just a configuration issue with running the Apache server from a live-cd. Any help in this area would be muchly appreciated.

Once again, thanks for your help.

Regards, Phydeaux.

Well...its sad to see that mandriva ships with a broken mklivecd script

Hi Wardevil,

Thanks for your reply. The mklivecd script is not "broken" since it works perfectly when using it to "remaster-on-the-fly" from the MCNLive CD. It's just that doing it this way to create the image that I need is going to take 4-5 stages, ie boot from MCNLive CD, remove not-needed software, install needed software, create image, burn image, boot from burned disc, install more software, create image, burn image, boot from burned disc, install more software, etc. The reason I have to do it this way is most likely due to memory issues as the machine I'm using only has 640Mb RAM, however, it does have nearly 1Gb of swap space which doesn't seem to be recognized by the MCNLive CD for some reason.

As for remastering from a hard-disk install, I am aware that I could compile my own kernel WITH support for the squashfs filesystem (and any other filesystems required), but I can't be bothered doing that just for this project.

Anyway, thanks again.

Regards, Phydeaux

I've been playing about with Linux for a few years now so I'm not a "noob". However, I have never had the need to create a live cd until now and in this area I am a "noob".

While there are many live distros that have some of the software I need, there appear to be none that have all the software that I need (MCNLive is no exception), so I decided to create my own. I do understand that MCNLive is intended to be a desktop system, but any Linux can be converted to a server. I chose MCNLive because it looks great and includes the necessary tools to create a live cd.

I've been playing about with this for over a week now with no success. I first installed MCNLive Toronto to my hard disk so that I can install the necessary software. This is where the problems started. First was the "broken pipe" and "segmentation fault" while creating the initrd.gz file (a minor issue that doesn't affect the build - easily resolved by stating "--splash=no" on the command line). The second problem (which caused the build process to fail) was in creating the compressed filesystem, the cause of this problem is the fact that the kernel installed by the live-install process does NOT support the squashfs filesystem, while the kernel on the live cd does provide support for this filesystem.

So, my question is - How to I create a live cd from my installed system?

Thanks for any help (in advance).

Regards, Phydeaux.