Re: Make Linux CDs

[Tony Nugent <Tony Nugent usq edu au>]

On Thu Oct 01 1998, David_M_Morgan rsh net wrote:

> I was unaware of not having to use the TRANS.TBL (that make it a bit
> easier next time for me).

So was I until I discovered it by accident :-)

> However you seem to be missing this point, the burn was done on Easy CD
> Creator which I have used you only get 8.3, Joliet, and iso 1 and 3.

No, I got that point.  The cdrom it produced proved to be useless for
installing RedHat.

> Now I wont say for a fact that iso1 or 3 are not RockRidge, but I don't
> belive that they are.

No, I suspect not.

> Thus that being said, if you use a CD burner that only supports those how
> are you to use the RockRidge extentions? You're forced in to the M$
> Joliet extentions

You loose... it just won't work.  Not for RedHat.  (Perhaps its ok for
Slackware, but slackware is quickly fading as a by-gone distribution).

Which is why my advice is to do it with linux.  All myy ranting and raving
was to show you (and others) how easy it is to do - and RedHat even gives
you all the tools you need to do it!  (mkisofs and cdrecord.  xcdroast
makes a nice interface to using them).

One point though... the CDROM burner itself (ie, the actual hardware) will
happily burn any image you give it (well, not really, it needs to be a
valid audio or digital image format).

The real issue is the *software* used to (1) create the image, and (2) burn
it onto the cdrom.  This is your hurdle, especially the first point.

It seems that your winloose software is useless for perserving unix
filesystem images unless it can understand the unix filesystem format
(ownership, permissions, filenames, symlinks) and then uses RockRidge
extentions to preserve these attributes.

Joliet will only preserve filenames and limited attributes (dir & shra - if
my memory is right).  This is ok for, say, cdroms with MP3 files or
whatever so that both linux and windows can see and use them in exactly the
same way for reading data, but useless for doing unix filesystems.

It is exactly the same problem when attempting to install RedHat from a FAT
partition, not prossible due to the filesystem inadequacies of dos/vfat.

Just look at the RedHat/instimage/{lib,bin}/ subdirectories on a RH CDROM
to see what I mean.  These are used by the install program - it mounts and
uses this as a "live" filesystem.  Joliet alone (nor vfat) is not
comprehensive enough to be able to represent the attributes of the files in
these directories.

If you really are stuck with using (not-so-?) easy-cd-creator, then you'll
need to stick with slugware.

However, have a serious look at SuSE or Debian.  I'm not at all familiar
with how these installations work, but as long as these distributions don't
use a live filesystem on their install CDROMs, you might get away with
building, creating and burning these images on a windoze box.

> The issue is whether to use (a) RockRidge (b) long filenames, and/or (c)
> Joliet.
> 
> (a) RockRidge
>      Absolutely essential for creating images of unix filesystems (to
>      preserve permissions, ownerships, symbolic links).  Linux needs
>      this.
>
> (b) long filenames
> (c) Joliet extensions
> 
>      Please yourself.  Linux doesn't care, but windoze does.
> 
>      If you don't use either of these when creating the image, windows
>      will have trouble looking at filenames, which is a real hassle when
>      you have things like web pages on it (it can't understand case or
>      anything other than 8.3 filenames).

One thing that I didn't mention about using the -l and -J switches to
mkisofs...

DO NOT USE BOTH OF THEM TOGETHER.  The image looks fine (you can even
loop-mount it to check that it's ok), but when it comes to the fixation at
the end of the burn, it fails miserably making the cdrom useless even as a
drink coaster.  This is probably a bug or oversight in mkisofs.  Use one or
the other, not both.  Windows prefers Joliet, linux doesn't care but - I
repeat - only as long as RockRidge extensions are used.


Cheers
Tony
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  Tony Nugent <Tony Nugent usq edu au>           <linux usq edu au>
  Computer Support Officer                       Faculty of Science
  University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba Oueensland Australia
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