Hi,
Rawhide on XO is shaping up nicely, and as a multiple G1G1 owner I'm happy to see that there is a future for my machines!
Here are steps I took to make it more fun:
1. remove all the "live cd" functions
I install the Rawhide images to NAND and have an SD card with a couple of partitions, one is for swap and one is for my OLPC data (including /security/develop.sig)
Since the NAND is read/write, no need for the live system overlay and all the loopback mounts. Disabling this speeds up the startup/boot process dramatically.
chkconfig livesys off chkconfig livesys-late off
remove the /etc/gdm/custom.conf to prevent the timed auto login using the liveuser.
I changed the liveuser from /etc/passwd and /etc/group to have my regular username and set passwords for both my account and root
Edit out some things from /boot/olpc.fth as well such as console on serial port etc. I am using:
root=mtd0 rootfstype=jffs2 video=lxfb lxfb.mode_option=1200x900@51
Now, it's "installed to disk."
2. GDM simple greeter fonts are too big and controls are obscured
Login as myself to a GNOME session, set the font DPI in the Appearance control panel (I am happy with 120 DPI)
Copy the gconf settings from my home directory to the home directory of the gdm user:
sudo cp -r ~scott/.gonf/desktop ~gdm/.gconf sudo chown -R gdm:gdm ~gdm/.gconf
the file ~gdm/.gconf/desktop/gnome/font_rendering/%gconf.xml is where you can set the DPI to make the greeter more usable.
3. auto find/use swap partition on SD card
One nice thing that the livesys init script did was finding and enabling swap partitions. I took that bit out of the script and added it to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:
. /etc/init.d/functions
# enable swaps unless requested otherwise swaps=`blkid -t TYPE=swap -o device` if ! strstr "`cat /proc/cmdline`" noswap && [ -n "$swaps" ] ; then for s in $swaps ; do action "Enabling swap partition $s" swapon $s done fi
4. moving the yum cache so there's enough disk space to groupinstall "Development Tools" and XFCE (and of course yum update...)
Created a symlink to move /var/cache/yum onto my SD card
ShanghaiScott
Hi Scott,
Here are steps I took to make it more fun:
- remove all the "live cd" functions
Thanks for this list of tricks. Another option is to conduct a full install from inside the live image with:
# yum install anaconda $ liveinst
.. as blogged about here: http://kushaldas.in/2009/03/06/how-to-install-soas-on-your-regular-box/
I can imagine producing an image for NAND of a regular install rather than a live image, even if we only do it at release time. Anyone know what the right way to do an automated "liveinst" would be, or another way of achieving the same goal? Can it be scripted at all?
- Chris.
On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 3:43 PM, Chris Ball cjb@laptop.org wrote:
Hi Scott,
> Here are steps I took to make it more fun: > > 1. remove all the "live cd" functions
Thanks for this list of tricks. Another option is to conduct a full install from inside the live image with:
# yum install anaconda $ liveinst
This will actually need "yum install anaconda libselinux-python" for the moment. There's a dep missing, I've filed a bug against anaconda so it should be fixed shortly.
Peter