I 'thought' I knew how to create a bootable usb thumbdrive, but must be doing something very wrong.
Downloaded the compressed file (for usb) and expanded it onto freshly formatted 4gb thumb drive.
Ran the bootinst.bat and that much does work. Copied a number of lzm files into /slax/modules , including the file for gparted (which is the primary focus of the exersize).
But when I boot drive, messages go by way too fast to read, but several seem to imply that the lzm files are corrupt.
It does load the gui desktop, and when I get to the menu, I find the entry for gparted. But when I select it, the app never starts, and no errors are displayed.
Can anyone help me track down the cuases of the errors?
Martyn
Well -- seems obvious your drive is booting, so that part of your problem is not accurately reported.
My instant guess is that you have corruption occurring in your changes -- try booting to always fresh mode. If that works, then you should immediately change directory to /slax/modules and run #md5sum some-module.lzm -- you can compare the result to the number shown on each module download page.
If that all works, then you should unzip one of the slaxsave.dat files [inside slaxsave.zip] and then edit slax.cfg on your usbstick to make it say 'changes=slaxsave.dat'.
Oh ... forgot, you should also delete the current /changes directory on the usbstick. Future changes will be saved inside the slaxsave.dat file. If you feel unsure about how to do this, then just format the usbstick and start over, using only always fresh bootups until you get a slaxsave.dat file working. You can copy-off your added lzm files to a safe place while you re-do the install, then replace them from your local storage.
As suggested, I did a md5sum *.lzm in the modules folder and got the full list of check sums.
But when I when to the modules download pages and searched for 'libaal-1.0.5.lzm', it showed to download, but no value for the correct checksum shows up!
Is there anyway to slowdown the console output during booting, or find the same entries in a log file?
"when I get to the menu, I find the entry for gparted. But when I select it, the app never starts, and no errors are displayed."
Open a console and type gparted. You will then be able to see the error messages.
Gparted modules eems to have a lot of dependencies , so some may not work.
The following is a gparted all in module that is working but it is a much older module. http://www.slax.org/modules.php?action=detail&id=319
Moved all to modules to the /optional folder and reboot the drive.
Comes up fine.
Then I went to the /slax/optional folder on the usb drive and began to double-click each of the lzm files and they all activated except for:
libsigc-2.2.5.lzm and glibmm-2.2.2.lzm
so I went back to the slax modules website, searched for each of these and downloaded again.
But when I rebooted the usb drive and manually activated the modules, the same two gave an error message but no details.
I don't have an answer for why that libaal file doesn't have an md5sum published, but I dl'ed it here and ran md5deep.exe on it, got a sum of 079f0d6 ..... 7253 on it. If yours matches then it probably didn't get corrupted in download.
Actually I thought it was a necessary feature of the modules section that all files had a published md5sum.
Edit: I just looked some more, and it appears that feature is gone. Oh, Tomas, where are you? The structure is crumbling.
After repeating the downloads 'several' times, all the modules were able to load. So I moved them all back to /slax/modules/ and rebooted the thumb drive on a target system and was able to correctly launch gparted.
But to 'my' surprise, I found that the system does not seem to support ext4 file systems, and when it finds one, it treats it as a read-only ext3 system (afaics).
Is there any way to alter this so I can mount/alter all my ext4 file systems?
