Building your own Linux distro

[viking60]

Just downloaded Slacko and trying to find Bones...The problem is that this thing is so complete it is enough to only add a couple of packages - If that is possible from other distros/repos then we have the perfect live CD here....
And then maybe not.. security does not seem to be an issue...
Also it seems impossible to paste anything into that urxvt terminal And I am not that familiar with this so I installed openbox and went to the puppy->Desktop menu and switched to openbox.. 2 sec. later I have it.
So I start by modifying the urxvt terminal: I want it to blend in as part of the Wallpaper and autostart it with htop. And if I need to write some command I am always there. Yet I want menus and programs to be on top of it - well because it is a part of the wallpaper.
If I can pull that off here then this thing will already be sexy
Got the transparency

Now I only have to get rid of those frames....and the scrollbar....And that is not so easy I have changed the code but nothing happens. Also I tried the Aerosnap. It works with the controll key but I have to set the resolution in pixels since Puppy is not to fond of percentage. And W is obviously not the letter to bind the Win-key in Puppy. Lots and lots of work
Nä time to check out that bones stuff I have not found anything yet....
Ah GRR looks like I have the wrong puppy for that - time to take a brake.
So far puppy is a nice and pretty complete lightweight distro. There is no problem in downloading Java and other stuff that you need and then you have your "build". You can install it to your USB dongle or whatever. But diving under the hood and making real changes has been a bit difficult. And to my surprise that was in some ways easier in SuseStudio. There you can start pretty much from scratch with the "barely enough OS" selection and build your lightweight disto like you want it. In Puppy - it is already built and altering it is more a matter of adding stuff - and that is very cool since you can add it from other repos out there (so they say - I have not found out how yet) or just click the links on pages like http://puppylinux.org/wikka/SlackoNews

[rolf]

Ok, while you are there in Woofland, I am here in the latest, greatest, maybe the lastest Suse Studio Berserk-OS-0.45. It all seems pretty smooth by now and I'm not too much going to experiment except to see if I kill my Mandriva / partition.

I've not too long ago installed a Vertex II 64G SSD to a pcie sata controller card, as all my sata connections are used up. I then used gparted to partition and copy Mandriva 2011 / and my XP C: drive to it, to see if performance is better. I formatted Mandriva / in reiserfs, just because I can.

There is Trim for ssd's that is an option for ext4 but not reiserfs. Basically Trim is where the OS identifies and reports unused blocks to the ssd firmware, which uses that opinion to make garbage collection and wear leveling decisions. I read a Vertex employee claim that the firmware does a good job and no such software intervention is required but many of us wonder, "what does he know?" For reiserfs3, there is a script in the hdparm package, wiper.sh, that is supposed to work on other fs, including reiserfs, to improve garbage collection, performance. Or destroy your data.

As it turns out, my sata controller the ssd is on uses sata_sil24 and wiper needs a patch to that driver to be somewhat less likely to destroy my data. The best way I know to see if my kernel is already patched is download the kernel source and look in the source code for sata_sil24.c, so I call yast from CL and get the very fine ncurses yast. In there, I can see a live install module and I might try that some other time.

Anyhoo, I find and install kernel-source, look at the .c file, and see all the patch is there and more. Good enough for me Let's see...

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linux:/home/user # sh /usr/sbin/wiper.sh /dev/sda2 --commit

wiper.sh: Linux SATA SSD TRIM utility, version 3.4, by Mark Lord.
wiper.sh: This tool is DANGEROUS! Please read and understand
wiper.sh: /usr/share/doc/packages/hdparm/README.wiper
wiper.sh: before going any further.
Preparing for offline TRIM of free space on /dev/sda2 (reiserfs non-mounted).

This operation could silently destroy your data.  Are you sure (y/N)? y
Syncing disks..
Beginning TRIM operations..

/dev/sda:
trimming 29256 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 16560 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 257280 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 95912 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 147640 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 23624 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 32280 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 40192 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 13712 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 316312 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 9848 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 123568 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 108688 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 246504 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 43040 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 642664 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 100928 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 163528 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 121752 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 202560 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 85944 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 162504 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 2056925 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1016091 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1457943 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1933953 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1591168 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1290760 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 459832 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1872816 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 950392 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 2088 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 269576 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 912976 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 588248 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 856 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 575077 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1592859 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 1914760 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 2609760 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 2841824 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 3266320 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 3254575 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 768478 sectors from 64 ranges
succeeded
trimming 439771 sectors from 8 ranges
succeeded
Done.
linux:/home/user #

See there? "succeeded". Many times. Everything must be all right. Only a reboot can tell...

[viking60]

Hey you are using it in the advanced Guru way! Hdparm was one of the last packages I added even if a version is conatined in Gparted they did not conflict so I packed it just to make sure.
Should I add libreiserfs-progs?
Forget it! They are alreaddy there in Gparted - just checked
That means that you might not succeed in Fubaring your install
If it works; we have evidence that the berserk OS is actually usefull

[rolf]

Well there are a lot of pieces of data so maybe I wouldn't know if something is missing. Data I/O benchmarking is not what I do best but hdparm has some timing switches. Some factor is I put the ssd and a 2T harddrive on the sata controller card and both show up running a step below the highest data transfer mode capability:

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[root@localhost rolf]# hdparm -i /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Model=OCZ-VERTEX PLUS R2, FwRev=1.2, SerialNo=644SR4V0FO79SSGC3822
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=12288
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=unknown, MaxMultSect=1, MultSect=1
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=120817072
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma6
 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: Unspecified:  ATA/ATAPI-5,6,7

 * signifies the current active mode

That is the ssd and the Hitachi 2T displayed the same shortcoming until I moved this SataIII beast over to my SataII motherboard controller. I don't know that it means anything but there you have it. I am in the middle of building a second-hand SataIII PCI3.0, USB3 motherboard and any benchmarks should wait for that. hdparm -tT has quite variable results and should be run multiple times for some average. Here is a short run for the ssd, sda, and the Hitachi, sdc. Surprisingly, the Hitachi reports better I/O. The ssd seems about the same as before I wipered it but maybe the trim happens some time later.

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[root@localhost rolf]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   7838 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3921.97 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 378 MB in  3.00 seconds = 125.86 MB/sec
[root@localhost rolf]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing cached reads:   7750 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3877.29 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 390 MB in  3.00 seconds = 129.93 MB/sec
[root@localhost rolf]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   7710 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3857.01 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 378 MB in  3.00 seconds = 125.90 MB/sec
[root@localhost rolf]# hdparm -tT /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
 Timing cached reads:   7406 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3705.41 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 398 MB in  3.00 seconds = 132.66 MB/sec


The ssd is fairly new and I should probably wait to see some speed degradation before doubting the words of Vertex engineers.

Regarding libreiserfs-progs, I am always formatting reiserfs and sometimes resizing or tuning, which I can use to change the uuid. (Copying partitions with gparted also copies uuid, making it tricky when you reboot with two partitions sometimes getting mounted to the same mount point ) In such a case, I would need those, whether they come packed with gparted I don't know, probably not.

[viking60]

Well they do conflict with Gparted so they are in the same business at least
I could make a version without Gparted and with those tools?

[rolf]

I don't see any filesystem (e.g. reiserfs*) binaries in gparted nor dependencies. I don't know how it works but I usually just use gparted, lately, for formatting, resizing, tuning. It's easy to format or tune to a different uuid on CL, let's see something...

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[root@localhost rolf]# which reiserfstune
/sbin/reiserfstune
[root@localhost rolf]# rpm -qf /sbin/reiserfstune
reiserfsprogs-3.6.21-2-mdv2011.0.x86_64
[root@localhost rolf]# which mkreiserfs
/sbin/mkreiserfs
[root@localhost rolf]# rpm -qf /sbin/mkreiserfs
reiserfsprogs-3.6.21-2-mdv2011.0.x86_64


Here, they are in reiserfsprogs, not a library package. I think gparted has these tools compiled in but there is no conflict, here.

[viking60]

I dunno libreiserfs-progs do conflict with Gparted in Suse it might be different dependencies
I Just noticed that if the keyboard problem does reapear; starting yast from CL as root has a menu option to alter it

[rolf]

Yeah, I noticed that, too.

[viking60]

You have given me some Ideas now - new build coming up.....

......When The Suse Build system stops hanging....

[viking60]

Suse studio is has been in "please wait your build wil start soon" mode or it hangs for a day or two. So it's not me.....
It has pretty much ben on "downloading packages 14 remaining" for two days now

[viking60]

Ah.. finally. It has taken so long that I have forgotten what I changed. But it was something about integrating the urxvt terminal in the wallpaper with htop running. You can quit htop and do any terminal work there. One obvious use would be to do a

Code: Select all

su
password: linux
yast

Then you have the yast menu integrated in the wallpaper. It will not be integrated until you have picked a wallpaper after startup. And I have added the option of the house terrorist - Gizmo - as a wallpaper (he forced me!).
I also added checkmedia; useful for using the check media option in Yast.
As always you can download it from here. If you get the norski keyboard just change it in Yast.

Logging out and back in again does actually work now too, even if that is not the most used feature in a Live CD.
And I am highly addicted to WIN or CTRL key + ARROW KEY's to minimize and move windows - to get full size use ALT+RIGHT ARROW.

You can move that integrated terminal by pressing ALT and dragging it - if you want to study Gizmos face closer...
Video coming up....

[rolf]

The last bit for my i5 2320 Quad Core is coming today, so that will be my immediate focus. I've got the Asus P8Z68 DELUXE GEN3 Socket 1155 'breadboarded' on the desk with G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXM and Galaxy GT 440 to test that it works. For boot OS, I tried to put Viking-Berserk-0.45 on a 4G CF with unetbootin and connect with a USB card reader but it wouldn't boot. I used dd to put a ROSA 2012-LTE x86_64 iso on there and it boots fine.

Would dd or some other trick put the SuseStudio Berserk-OS iso on bootable flash?