frugal install -- menu.lst for old grub version?

[Shador]

I appreciate your indulgence on my issue, understand it's not the intended usage. I have had good success booting other slack-like livecds in this poor man's manner, though none using your system.

Actually it is intended usage just not documented. Anyway I suspect the poor man's install is not the issue here.

And after asking 2x I still have no idea what enables persistence.

I can't seem to find those. Apart, I thought you already found out yourself that it's enabled by default. There's also a savefile cheatcode which allows you to change the basename (i.e. the last component of the path --> salixlive.save). The actual path used is $basedir/salix/persistence/$savefile

OK, I tried that, made no difference at all to the panic. One thing that did make a difference, allowed me to boot one time, was to run a mkfs.reiserfs on the container file, after which it booted in what looks like normal fashion. Changed a couple things, but then a reboot evoked the same panic. Tried that again to be sure; it boots fine when that file is empty, panics when it has anything inside it. And after asking 2x I still have no idea what enables persistence.

You seem to be deleting /bin/chroot from the live environment. As this change is saved with the persistence file you can't boot anymore. At least by doing that I'm getting exactly the same error message as you.
So that makes me wondering what those couple things are or whatever else you did to trigger such a change. Maybe you should try first with small changes. Adding a file to my home directory was e.g. no problem.

Giving up here, good luck with your distro, and thanks again for the effort you put into my issue.

That's unfortunate. It would have been interesting to know how you triggered that removal of /bin/chroot.

[burninbush]

That's unfortunate. It would have been interesting to know how you triggered that removal of /bin/chroot. >shador

+++++++++++++++++++

What I changed:

-- switched to the alternate wallpaper inside the distro
-- in kde setup, changed a font setting and enabled smoothing
-- in kde setup, unchecked the snap windows to edges setting
-- in kde setup, switched to left-hand mouse

and then I rebooted just to verify it was saving changes, got the usual panic. I can't imagine any of that affects /bin/chroot.

p.s. -- just looked inside the .save file, it has no /bin directory. After those changes above, it now holds 156+ mb of stuff, mostly under /home/one -- in akonadi cache?

[ikke]

Wish to confirm that I am using a frugal install of Salix from the very beginning years ago. Up to now I am booting with the old grub. Never got any serious problem.

The only problem I encountered was with the latest 13.37 version based on the SALT scripts. The system refuses to boot if installed on a ext4 formatted system. I have asked in this forum why this happens but didn't get any reply.

Have installed a xfce and kde version of salix 13.37 on the same (ext3 formatted) stick. Here is my menu.lst entry for KDE
"
title KDE salix-kde-13.37-32-rc1.live LiveCD from (hd0,0)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /salix_KDE-13.37-32-rc1/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 quiet autologin rw nopcmcia vga=791 splash=silent keyb=us lang=en_US locale=en_US.utf8 langnum=3 noauto max_loop=15 nouveau.blacklist=1
initrd /salix_KDE-13.37-32-rc1/boot/initrd.xz
"
Am confident you 'll be able to enjoy salix-kde-13.37 frugally installed ...

[JRD]

Since you don't use the menu ikke, the "langnum" parameter is useless.
For ext4...I simply don't know and never had the chance to test this type of install.

[ikke]

Thank you for your reaction

Since you don't use the menu ikke, the "langnum" parameter is useless.

I'll delete that "langnum=3". Have been copying it from the LiveCD parameters I guess.
Do the other 'menu.lst'-paramters seem OK to you? Am old fashioned : I still prefer the old grub to grub2

For ext4...I simply don't know and never had the chance to test this type of install.

Will do more testing and let you know.

Thank you very much.

[Shador]

I have asked in this forum why this happens but didn't get any reply.

Sorry, it happens that I can't respond immediately and when I can't write me a memo, I sometimes forget about it.

The system refuses to boot if installed on a ext4 formatted system.

That's too few information to help you. I don't know whether I ever tested the exact same scenario, you tried. But I definitely didn't use grub legacy. (It's unmaintained and offers no benefit over grub2.) In any case I certainly loopback booted the iso image from my ext4 home partition more than once. That shouldn't be any different from an exploded image. So any information that you can gather what exactly is going wrong would be useful.

p.s. -- just looked inside the .save file, it has no /bin directory. After those changes above, it now holds 156+ mb of stuff, mostly under /home/one -- in akonadi cache?

OK, thanks. I had a talk with JRD and his idea was that possibly the Live didn't shutdown cleanly or didn't fully finish the shutdown. Any such observations?
Could you also please give us a directory listing of the root of the filesystem on the persistence file INCLUDING hidden files.

[ikke]

I have asked in this forum why this happens but didn't get any reply.

Sorry, it happens that I can't respond immediately and when I can't write me a memo, I sometimes forget about it.

Shador, thank you for reaction. I appreciated you help in this respect .I don't want to be ungrateful.

The system refuses to boot if installed on a ext4 formatted system.

That's too few information to help you. I don't know whether I ever tested the exact same scenario, you tried. But I definitely didn't use grub legacy. (It's unmaintained and offers no benefit over grub2.) In any case I certainly loopback booted the iso image from my ext4 home partition more than once. That shouldn't be any different from an exploded image. So any information that you can gather what exactly is going wrong would be useful.

I gave you the error info :
"

Code: Select all

Fatal Error
Could not find the distro to boot
File searched : salix-xfce-13.37-32.live
Content searched : 88d818ae211826b61c7f038ab0e1dee1

I confirm that the salix-xfce-13.37-32.live is on / with the correct contents.

Guess it has something to do with SaLT. Got no problems with salix-xfce-13.1.2.
"
And now you have my grub legacy entry. What more info can I give you?

One of the reasons I don't use grub2 is that I am not allowed to edit the grub.cfg file directly and I do not know how to handle grub2 so that salixlive frugally installed can be booted. Can you provide with your grub2 entry to boot the iso from an ext4 partition. Would like to try it.

Really, I appreciate very much your thoughts on how to solve this problem.

[burninbush]

burninbush wrote:p.s. -- just looked inside the .save file, it has no /bin directory. After those changes above, it now holds 156+ mb of stuff, mostly under /home/one -- in akonadi cache?


OK, thanks. I had a talk with JRD and his idea was that possibly the Live didn't shutdown cleanly or didn't fully finish the shutdown. Any such observations?
Could you also please give us a directory listing of the root of the filesystem on the persistence file INCLUDING hidden files. >shador

+++++++++++++++++

Sorry, it's all deleted. But there was no unusual shutdown, just reboots under the K menu. Maybe your system scripts need to know at boot time that I'll be using persistence? I asked how to do that, but you didn't seem to know. It wouldn't take much effort to duplicate what I was doing here, as I described it up the thread.

Odd to me, it started filling the .save file as soon as it was created; I did nothing to mount it -- and I was only rebooting through what must be a legitimate [K menu] method. However, starting with an empty .save file made no lasting difference, the next reboot would panic again.

My interest in Salix was only for the live media, don't need another standard install of slack 13.37. I saw the structure of the dvd and thought perhaps you intended to support expansion of that system with xz modules, a la Slax/Nimblex/Porteus/others, but in looking at the site I see no evidence for that.

Otherwise, I'm too old to wait two days for an 'I don't know' answer to what seem to me to be simple questions if I were speaking to the creator of a new release. Someone there must know this stuff directly.

To anyone else who is primarily interested in running an expandable Slack live that has persistence and is fully supported, I suggest you take a look at Porteus. It's their only product.

[JRD]

The SaLT system use "blkid" and "file" to find and determine the filesystem. If any of these tools have problem with ext4, then it is the reason of not finding the distro. I will look into these.
P.S. These tools are not the exact tools you can find in your distro. The first one in the one of busybox, the second one is statically compiled by me to be included in the initrd.

[JRD]

Maybe your system scripts need to know at boot time that I'll be using persistence? I asked how to do that, but you didn't seem to know.

You're making asumptions. Nothing is needed to tell you're using persistence. If the correct file is present in persistence directory, it is used as a persistence file. And, it's weird thinking that I don't know since I created the SaLT system.

Otherwise, I'm too old to wait two days for an 'I don't know' answer to what seem to me to be simple questions

The "I don't know" refers to the question of Ikke about ext4, not about your problem at all. What is your "simple question" ? I only see a possible bug here, that we try to understand and correct if possible. We're not paid to do this. We try to be nice to resolve a problem and to doing so, we try to get as much information as possible to understand and then correct this behavior.

Someone there must know this stuff directly.

Who ? Shador and I created the SaLT system. I think we are correctly place to help you...or maybe you don't want to talk to us anymore ?

To anyone else who is primarily interested in running an expandable Slack live that has persistence and is fully supported, I suggest you take a look at Porteus

Then use it and ciao.