lesslinux.org Development Blog

When testing recent builds I found out that netboot was broken. I found out the following reasons:

• For wgetiso=http://server/path/lesslinux.iso BusyBox’ wget implementation proved too unstable and often failed, I now added a curl binary, statically linked against musl-libc and nothing else, this means no HTTPS support for now. Using curl now also allows to determine the size of the tmpfs where the downloaded ISO will be stored automatically, so you do not have to calculate and specify wgetsize=1234567 (in kilobyte) anymore.

• The nfs=12.34.56.78:/path/to/isodir method failed because of the missing module nfsv3, the split happened somewhere between 3.17 and 3.19. It is fixed now, but just tested against a few NFS kernel servers.

Booting from a CIFS filesystem was not changed, but tested (works), just specify cifs=//12.34.56.78/share to search ISO Images there. When I did apply those changes I also looked for some ways to add “overlays”, a simple hook for adding a tarball that is unpacked over the root filesystem. This method allows you to add your own startup scripts or significantly change the xinitrc. This is mainly targetted at applications where you use LessLinux as some automatic backup or deployment system. Details on the possibilites of this feature will follow.

Get the latest build: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20150704-135812.iso