Remastering

From XDSL

When booting from a Live CD/Frugal install X-DSL's filesystem heavily compressed and read only. If you want to modify X-DSL and have your changes included in this compressed filesystem you will need to remaster X-DSL. This is not the only mechanism for customising X-DSL. You can also extend X-DSL using myDSL extensions, creating a backup of your settings, or using a Loopback/Native install.

The remastering procedure boils down to 3 steps:

  • Mount the compressed filesystem
  • Copy the contents of the compressed filesystem to a working directory and make your modifications
  • Remake the compressed filesystem
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Mounting the compressed filesystem

X-DSL uses a cloop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop) filesystem when booting from a Live CD/Frugal install. In order access it's contents you must first mount this filesystem in Linux. This requires the cloop kernel module. Depending on your distribution this may be available as an installable package. Otherwise you will need to download the source (http://developer.linuxtag.net/knoppix/sources/) for the module and compile it against your current kernel. You will also need the cloop-utils are normally installed along side this module.

Once you have this module put the X-DSL CDROM in your drive and do the following: 

modprobe cloop (loads the cloop module)
mkdir /mnt/cloop
mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom (mount the X-DSL cdrom)
mount -o ro,loop=/dev/cloop0 /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX /mnt/cloop (mount the cloop filesystem)
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Making modifications

Before you can start making modifications you will need a directory to store the contents of the X-DSL filesystem. This will require at least 200Mbs of free space on a Linux partition. You cannot use a fat/fatx partition since these filesystems do not preserve file permissions, symlinks, device nodes, etc. I will use /var/xdsl as my working directory. 

mkdir /var/xdsl
mkdir /var/xdsl/source
mkdir /var/xdsl/newcd
cp -a /cdrom/* /var/xdsl/newcd
cp -a /mnt/cloop/* /var/xdsl/source
cp -a /mnt/cloop/.bash_profile /var/xdsl/source

At this point the contents of the X-DSL filesystem are contained in the /var/xdsl/source directory and the contents of the CDROM are in /var/xdsl/newcd. You may now make whatever changes you see fit. You may find it easier to make these changes by chrooting into the X-DSL filesystem using chroot /var/xdsl/source (use exit to quit the chrooted enviroment).

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Remake the compressed filesystem

Once you are happy with the changes you've made use the following commands to remake the X-DSL cd: 

mkisofs -R /var/xdsl/source | create_compressed_fs - 65536 > /var/xdsl/newcd/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
mkisofs -r -J -udf -o /var/xdsl/myremaster.iso /var/xdsl/newcd

Your remastered iso is then available under /var/xdsl/myremaster.iso. Burn this to some recordable media known to work in your Xbox and enjoy :)

Retrieved from "http://www.x-dsl.org/wiki/Remastering"