Re: Compiling kernel with Speakup

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Hi Tony,

> Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 00:51:53 -0800
> From: Tony Baechler <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

> Just to clarify, the kernel I am working on is for the installation CD, so
> somehow it needs to boot the system.
> [..] I still have not found any init script, menu, lilo, etc. on the
> CD to actually get the system to start, so I am not sure what to do
> after I get the diffs applied.


I did not take a close look at the distribution but here is what I know
about bootable CD-ROMS:

The standard is called "El Torito". You can find more information about it
in the Bootdisk-HOWTO, CD-Writing-HOWTO and via "man mkisofs". If you boot
from CD-ROM the BIOS will simulate a floppy drive for you. The data for
that "floppy" is found in the file "boot.img", which is a exact image of a
boot-floppy as you would get with "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=./mybootfloppy.img".
So this file must be _exactly_1440 kByte in size. The "boot.cat" is some
catalog, which purpose I don't know. mkisofs will create it for you
anyway. If you want to make a bootable cdrom use this command:

mkisofs -o outfile.iso -r -J -b boot/boot.img -c boot/boot.cat /cddata

The filenames of boot-image and catalog are relative to the cd-root.

If you want to "reverse engineer", i.e. look what happens at booting a
given cd-rom mount the file "boot.img" on that cdrom with the loopback
device:

mount -o loop ro boot.img /mnt

There you will (hopefully) find startup-scripts, ramdisks, etc.

Or maybe you will find out how they made the boot.img somewhere in their
documentation/source-code.

Hope this gets you a step fourther.

Bjoern





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