Stuff that has not yet gone into the official build.
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ukbrian

- ukbrian
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Sun Jan 29, 2012 1:44 pm

I noticed this post on the mint forums that might be of interest to you

> i have been trying to bugfix this installer to work on a debian unstable live image made using remastersys

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=189&t=92841
He looks to be in need of your refracta snapshot/installer.
ukbrian

- ukbrian
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Mon Jan 30, 2012 4:44 pm

I just tried it on SolusOS, a Gnome based distro which is being developed by Ikey the original developer of LMDE and after changing the .desktop file to

> Exec=gksu 'gnome-terminal -e /usr/bin/refractainstaller-gui'

The snapshot installed successfully.
I couldn't get the Refracta installer working first of all and as the SolusOS installer was in the menu I tried it and it worked on the Refracta snapshot.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Sun Mar 25, 2012 7:31 pm

I just tried refractasnapshot on SolusOS (RC3), and I ran into some problems.
Installed SolusOS in virtualbox.
Installed refractasnapshot-base from .deb file. Some dependencies were missing, so I installed those (squashfs-tools, syslinux, live-boot, live-config, etc.) with 'apt-get -f install'.
Installed refractasnapshot-gui from .deb file.
Ran the gui version, and got no fatal errors.
Tried to boot the iso in vbox, but got errors like "can't write to read-only filesystem". See link for screenshot where it hung.
http://www.picvalley.net/v.php?p=u/1716 ... kGL3CG.PNG
ukbrian

- ukbrian
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Thu Mar 29, 2012 10:30 pm

Thanks a million for giving me some of your irreplaceable quality time.
I'm slow answering because I really don't want to make any mistakes with this,it's very important to me.
Ikey the dev is unavailable at the moment his laptop broke and I'm setting up transport to take a machine up to him. http://forums.solusos.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=475
I'll make a post on the other forum with a link here so you might be able to someone more capable than me.
I will follow your instructions and install Rafracta there on a hard drive, these things are great. http://www.cclonline.com/product/54784/IB-172SK-B/External-HDD-Enclosure/IcyBox-IB-172SK-B-Internal-Hard-Drive-Rack/HDD0516/
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Mon Apr 16, 2012 2:05 pm

Two newer versions of refractasnapshot-base are at github - 9.0.3 and 9.0.4. These are still experimental. The idea is to make the snapshot tool work better with other distros. There are new configuration items, so you can use a custom iso directory to build the live-cd with your own boot menu or help pages, or simply edit the boot menu on the fly, so you can have it list something other than "Refracta" .The work directory has been moved out of /tmp, so that it works with wheezy or others that use a tmpfs for /tmp.
vireo

- vireo
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Sat Apr 28, 2012 5:07 am

> fsmithred wrote:Two newer versions of refractasnapshot-base are at github - 9.0.3 and 9.0.4. These are still experimental. The idea is to make the snapshot tool work better with other distros. There are new configuration items, so you can use a custom iso directory to build the live-cd with your own boot menu or help pages, or simply edit the boot menu on the fly, so you can have it list something other than "Refracta" .The work directory has been moved out of /tmp, so that it works with wheezy or others that use a tmpfs for /tmp.

Would it be possible to fork refracta over to Centos 6.2?(( RPM,)) there are no remaster tools that work on it, No one is forking centos , It seems to be more stable then squeeze. It comes with no repos, and very little software, I would like to make a re-spin of it with a bundle of common software and repos... instead of spending hours trying to find everything every time i reinstall it.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Sat Apr 28, 2012 12:43 pm

> vireo wrote:Would it be possible to fork refracta over to Centos 6.2?(( RPM,)) there are no remaster tools that work on it, No one is forking centos , It seems to be more stable then squeeze. It comes with no repos, and very little software, I would like to make a re-spin of it with a bundle of common software and repos... instead of spending hours trying to find everything every time i reinstall it.

I tried either refractainstaller or refractasnapshot with fedora once, but it didn't work, and I can't recall the errors. Stuff was in different places or some commands had different names. If you want to try it with Centos and post the error log, we might be able to figure it out. You'll need to manually copy files into place and/or hack the script for the location of config and excludes files.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Tue May 01, 2012 8:21 pm

Refractainstaller on Centos:
Didn't work. It failed on update-grub. There is no update-grub. Where do I get that, or how do you do that in Centos? (nm, I searched and found the answer: edit grub.conf manually.)
Refractasnapshot on Centos:
Not there yet, but almost. Had to make some changes.
- There's no /vmlinuz or /initrd.img in Centos, so you have to put the right filenames in the config file.
- replace 'dpkg -l' with 'rpm -qa' to create the package list. (Oh yeah, nobody knows about that feature yet. Coming soon in 9.0.5.)
- Have to figure out why it's not showing disk space. In a terminal, 'df -h' works, but in the script, 'df -h | awk blahblah' doesn't work. OK, problem is that the filesystem name is too long, and the output comes out on two lines, which throws off all the fields for awk.
- Had to comment out these two lines:
#rsync -a /usr/lib/syslinux/isolinux.bin "$iso_dir"/isolinux/
#rsync -a /usr/lib/syslinux/vesamenu.c32 "$iso_dir"/isolinux/
In Centos, the above two files are in /usr/share/syslinux.
- had to replace "nano" with "vim" to be able to edit the boot menu. Will create a variable for "$editor" so you can easily use your favorite.
fsmithred

- fsmithred
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Wed May 02, 2012 4:50 pm

Well, I managed to create an iso from a Centos installation in virtualbox. The boot menu comes up and the help screens work, but it won't boot. I'm guessing that it's because some important dependencies are missing, such as live-boot and live-config, and I don't know a way around that. Centos has its own method for getting the live-CD up and running. Lucky for the people who use Centos and would like to create their own live-CD, somebody is already working on it. - https://projects.centos.org/trac/livecd/
anticapitalista

- anticapitalista
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## Re: Refracta installer and snapshot used on other distros

Wed May 09, 2012 2:23 pm

I adapted refractasnapshot to work on antiX with the antiX kernel and the antiX way of making a live iso. (We do not use the Debian live scripts). It works well, but very high processor use causes some laptop users to complain about over heating. Any ideas how to reduce this?
For those running antiX with a non-antiX kernel (Debian, liquorix, Libre), refracta snapshot (the latest at github) successfully creates an iso, but it doesn't boot. The error is at the boot screen: Boot failure : No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found!
(Does syslinux need to be installed?)
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