Re: More information about creating a Familiar 0.4 jffs image using mkfs.jffs2

Alexander Guy writes:
> On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 07:19:17PM -0600, Davide Bruzzone wrote:
> > Greetings all...
> >
> > I'm new to Linux on the iPaq, and am trying to obtain/compile more detailed
> > information about creating a custom Familiar 0.4 jffs image using
> > mkfs.jffs2.

As Alexander mentioned, you will want to use the ipkg utility scripts
to make custom images. Follow the instructions at
http://handhelds.org/sources.html and checkout the familiar/dist
module.

Basically, the way this works is that you use ipkg on a desktop
machine to install packages into a directory other than / and then use
mkfs.jffs2 to package the directory up. The ipkg-make-familiar script
can come in handy for these steps. Edit /etc/ipkg.conf (or
$IPKG_CONF_DIR/ipkg.conf) to point ipkg at the directory of interest.

The main reason I would encourage you to use ipkg in this way is to
reduce duplicated effort. For many months I was wasting a lot of time
making custom images after each new distribution was released. I wrote
ipkg specifically so that I would never have to do this again.

So, rather than manually munging on the directory structure that comes
in task-familiar-complete.tar.gz I would encourage you to look at the
specific packages included in the task-familiar-complete package. If
anything is missing, then make up a new ipkg for it. If some files
seem unnecessary then perhaps you could split some packages into
finer-grained packages.

Finally, I would recommend that you create a top-level "task package"
to control your custom image, very similar to
task-familiar-complete. This package would contain no files, but would
simply have all the dependencies necessary to include every package
that you want in your final image. If you do this then you will be
able to say something like "ipkg-make-familiar task-custom-bruzzone".

Please see http://www.handhelds.org/z/wiki/iPKG for more information,
(although there's not much more documentation on this off-line use of
ipkg than what I just gave you above).

Let me know if you have any questions,

-Carl
Received on Fri May 18 06:27:49 2001