Hi.

Well... A way way back I installed a whole slew of standard UNIX utils from a debian tarball that had been posted on this BBS... I think those basics (things like tee, join, cut, gawk, etc) should be there in addition to what you've mentioned. Basically all the important UNIX stuff that the standard developer image leaves out.


Agreed.

Here's my concern though... Your strategy seems to be to use an alternate root partition on /dev/hda2 and chrooting to it. If this is done, the standard root partition (/dev/hda5) is wasted, right?

No. My approach is different from that, for copyright and technical reasons.

1. For copyright reasons, I can't integrate the original software into my partition images. Therefore, my partition image needs to be modified before upload, copying the original binaries in, or it needs to access the original software on the empeg from a different (the original) software partition.
2. I can't create a software that integrates the original binaries into my image for a simple reason: Those who will benefit the most from my upgrade file are those that are _not_ Unix guys but want additional software on their empegs. And those people most certainly use Windows, which is not capable of writing to an ext2 image.
   

I always thought the best solution would be to install a standard linux setup on the regular root partition and use /dev/hda2 for the user apps (packages) that people want to install. This would keep the apps OFF the music partition, where they tend to cause problems with synchronization. I don't think there's more than 16mb of things we really need on the root partition, is there? Everything else would seem to be package-able, and reside on /dev/hda2. At least in my mind..

Well, like said above, I need to use two partitions, one for my root image and one for the original software. and I don't see how installing additional software on the music partition could affect synchronization (apart from using up space). As long as it isn't installed in the "fids" subdirectory of the music partition.

Installing the packages on the music partition has the additional benefit of not being affected by any update to the empeg software or my image.

This would make sure we're not wasting /dev/hda5, and as I said, avoid problems with apps running on the music drive and causing fsck's and syncs to fail.

I currently have telnetd running from the music partition, and no sync or fsck failed yet. Are there any verified incidents where that happened?

Ciao,
Sven