LinuxBBQ

Hi all. I have been trying to boot a few linuxbbq ISOs, but have encountered problems.

To begin with, I downloaded linuxbbq-bork, and installed it to a USB. That went okay, but I have a fairly new laptop with UEFI, and the only way I could get it to boot from liveUSB was to put it into Legacy mode. So yes, I got it to boot, but it was a hassle.

I know there are UEFI-BIOS settings to play with. But basically, I feel the UEFI on this laptop is half-broken. When I switched it back from "Legacy" to "UEFI", my old settings were somehow wiped, and it went back to autobooting Windows. But I will spare you the gruesome details.

So on this laptop, booting from LiveUSB is a hassle. So if I download an ISO, I'd rather do a frugal install, and then boot to it through GRUB.

I hoped that linuxbbq was compatible with "grub-imageboot". By just copying the ISO into /boot/images for my main distro and then running "update-grub2", the new linuxbbq-bork grub entry was added. But when I tried it, nothing happened. So seemingly, it was incompatible.

My second attempt was to add this entry to my main distros /etc/grub.d/41_custom. I wrote this after inspecting the syslinux files in the ISO. And on this occasion, linuxbbq-bork booted, but then stopped. Indeed, I suspect that it couldn't find the initrd? And it is hard to wrangle this stuff further without knowing what all those boot codes mean.
So I finally ask, for someone who wants to try a few ISOs without doing a full install, for someone who prefers a good frugal install over using a liveUSB, are there any approved frugal install howtos for linuxbbq? Thanks :-)

Hello,

that's an interesting question, thanks for raising it. I have no experience with UEFI (our spins should actually work on old computers, so that is our first priority)

The boot scripts for live are different from the installed session (/lib/live is the place where live boot scripts are placed), so don't let yourself be fooled :)

It should be possible to create a partition with fdisk, tune2fs it and then simply copy over the extracted squashfs file, chroot into it, and run grub-install there. I would try this in a VM first, btw. Actually the installer does the same, so I am not sure if this makes a difference with UEFI.

So, that is all I can say. Maybe someone else can chime in -- I have not touched a UEFI computer yet.

daggoth wrote:And on this occasion, linuxbbq-bork booted, but then stopped. Indeed, I suspect that it couldn't find the initrd?

It turns out that I was wrong. Both the kernel and initrd loaded, and then entered a panic state because it could not find the correct medium containing a live filesystem.

machinebacon wrote:The boot scripts for live are different from the installed session (/lib/live is the place where live boot scripts are placed), so don't let yourself be fooled :)

I guess by /lib/live, you meant within the initrd. Crikey, it is a huge set of scripts in there. After searching, I decided the initramfs was likely the product of initramfs-tools and live-initramfs, where the live-initramfs manpage lists extra boot codes and their usage. Looking at the isoboot/loopback grub entry from my first post, I still haven't found a way to make that work. But I do see two other ways to do a frugal install.

Method 1

The simplest frugal install possible is to mount the linuxbbq ISO file, and copy the files exactly into an empty partition, for example /dev/sda8. The squashfs remains compressed. Then append something like this to /etc/grub.d/41_custom, and update your grub. When booted, the initrd will by default look for any partition with a /live folder, and live-boot into it.

Method 2

The first method works great for just one frugal install. But what if you want to have several concurrent frugal installs? I don't know exactly, but it would becomes less clearcut to the initrd which of several partitions to live-boot. So instead, to keep it things tidy, I propose to install Bork to /boot/frugal/bork, CLit to /boot/frugal/clit, and so forth. Separated folders.

So first, I copy in the contents of the ISO :- Then assuming /boot is on /dev/sda7, I append this to /etc/grub.d/41_custom, then update my grub... By default, the initrd will always look for a partition with a /live folder to live-boot. But the live-media-path bootcode tells the initrd that it should look for a partition/medium with a /boot/frugal/bork/live folder instead. Such that provided my various frugal installs all have their own unique folders, it should never get confused.

Well, that is all working for me so far. And now I can get to the serious business of trying out a few LinuxBBQ ISOs...

excellent documentation, thanks a lot.

awesome, thanks for the elaborate explanation daggoth, way to start your BBQ career ;)

i say, time for a motherfucking intro-thread.