today!!

hi

CGI - tried and true

As time permits I am looking agoin at one of my favourite books: "CGI Internet Programming with C++ and C", Mark Felton, 1997

oh yea forgot about this one

hmmm haven't been here for a while maybe tomorrow

sya-710 lab 8 creating a live cd

livecd-tools is already installed on my f9 computer

I chose to use the minimal kickstart file to save time as it is
ok to update the system later.
I changed the line selinux --enforcing to --permissive in the ks file.

~]# livecd-creator -c /usr/share/livecd-tools/livecd-fedora-minimal.ks --fslabel=live-
fedora.min

Should end up with a file called live-fedora-min.iso
I'll return to this after the iso is created.

running wubi.py

still some issues - to start with i should have made a bigger windows partition when i installed xp

i slimmed down the isolist.ini file to one entry but i really need it to find the local .iso for figuring out how things are working - slowly getting further along though

below is the basic tasklist of what the installation consists of:
note that the tasks on the left match the message in the installation window
- helps just to get a basic idea of where things are

     def get_installation_tasklist(self):
        tasks = [
            ("Selecting target directory", self.select_target_dir),
            ("Creating the installation directories", self.create_dir_structure),
            ("Creating the uninstaller", self.create_uninstaller),
            ("Copying files", self.copy_installation_files),
            ("Retrieving the Metalin", self.get_metalink),
            ("Retrieving the ISO", self.get_iso),
            ("Extracting the kernel", self.extract_kernel),
            ("Uncompressing files", self.uncompress_files),
            ("Choosing disk sizes", self.choose_disk_sizes),
            ("Creating a preseed file", self.create_preseed),
            ("Adding a new bootlader entry", self.modify_bootloader),
            ("Creating the virtual disks", self.create_virtual_disks),
            ("Uncompressing files", self.uncompress_files),
            ("Ejecting the CD", self.eject_cd),
            ("Rebooting", self.reboot),
        ]

So backing up - in the basic info used before the windows frontend (the actual install window) the last function in the list below might be the one that finds the local .iso file

def fetch_basic_info(self):
'''
Basic information required by the application dispatcher select_task()
'''
self.info.original_exe = self.get_original_exe()
self.info.platform = self.get_platform()
self.info.osname = self.get_osname
self.info.language, self.info.encoding = self.get_language_encoding()
self.info.environment_variables = os.environ
self.info.arch = self.get_arch()
self.info.languages = self.get_languages()
self.info.distros = self.get_distros()
self.fetch_basic_os_specific_info()
self.info.uninstaller_path = self.get_uninstaller_path()
self.info.previous_targetdir = self.get_previous_targetdir()
self.info.previous_backupdir = self.get_previous_backupdir()
self.info.keyboard_layout = self.get_keyboard_layout()
self.info.total_memory_mb = self.get_total_memory_mb()
self.info.locale = self.get_locale(self.info.language)
self.info.cd_path, self.info.cd_distro = self.find_any_cd()
self.info.iso_path, self.info.iso_distro = None, None #self.find_any_iso()

understanding python's ConfigParser - sort-of

call these notes to myself: ConfigParser is a python core module that is used to parse a configuration file

ok that was a path issue - my test.py file was higher in the directory structure than wubi.py so it was able to find the data directory (i actually did two things - should have done them one at a time 1. modified pythonpath env variable to exhaustively include every directory being used 2. copied the data directory to the same location as the wubi.py file - i'll step back and see which one worked)

running wubi python code - the code uses a configuration file to both find out what to install and where to get it

the configuration file looks something like this - but with several sections (this shows only one section:
############ config.ini #####################
[mysection1]
arch=i386
name=fedora
packages=fedora-desktop
metalink=http://somewebsite.com/metalink
metalink2=http://someotherwebsite.com/metalink
ordering=1
##############################################

#!/usr/bin/env python
# the file to parse here is the actual .ini file shipped with wubi
import ConfigParser

myfiletoparse = 'c:\python25\scripts\intrepid.python\data\isolist.ini'
print('Parsing myfiletoparse=%s' % myfiletoparse)
configtree = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
configtree.read(myfiletoparse) #reads file looking for [sections] etc

for distro in configtree.sections(): 
    print('the section=%s' % distro)

##################### no problem parsing the file ###############33
the section=Xubuntu-amd64
the section=Kubuntu-amd64
the section=Ubuntu-amd64
the section=Ubuntu-i386
the section=Kubuntu-i386

current problem is that the file fails to open in the wubi code - exactly the same file, same path and everything. I added a print statement in the ConfigParser.read() function

#### part of Config.Parser.read() ################
read_ok = []
for filename in filenames:
try:
fp = open(filename)
except IOError:
print('cannot seem to open the file=%s' % filename)
continue
self._read(fp, filename)
fp.close()
read_ok.append(filename)
return read_ok
#######################################################################
here is the debugger output - not sure what is going on here unless it is apath issue
so i'll try the same fle in a different location or something

looking at the linux boot process

This is just a temporary record that I will pull together with some other stuff for figuring out wubi

Working primarily on Windows:
Extract files from the iso C:\7z.exe x F10-live-cd.iso

Then use Fedora to open up the ram disk:
lu@localhost$ gunzip < initrd0.img | cpio -i --make-directories
I copied it back to the windows computer to read the init boot script(s) and maybe edit them - then the whole lot (the stuff extracted from initrd.img) can be repacked
on Fedora using something like
lu@localhost$ find ./ -H newc -o > initrd.cpio
lu@localhost$ gzip initrd.cpio
lu@localhost$ mv initrd.cpio.gz initrd0.img

Note: this is a bit unweildy; maybe there is an easier way - but I cannot find anything that runs in Windows to take extract the files from a .img file but seeing it is really a gzipped cpio archive that might be possible (to do: rename the .img file to .cpio.gz and see if common windows extractors will understand it)

GNUwin32 does have gzip.exe, gunzip.exe and cpio.exe and they have no problem extracting the directory structure from initrd.img (so long as i name in .cpio.gz so that makes things a bit less unweildy - haven't tried torepack them yet but that is a detail for later - back to stepping through the wubi python stuff.

(That image - probably should say picture here - might be too small to read but...) the directory that is open in the image is the extracted initrd.img file and in the subdirectory sbin where the real-init boot script lives (after making any changes the whole iso will need to be zipped up again)