CREATING A BOREALIS BOOT CD

You can create a Borealis boot Cd using Slax Unix. The version used in this example is: slax-5.1.8.1.iso. First you need to burn a Cd containing the iso file to get the Slax files. You can also test the Cd to see if Slax will boot. You'll probably be burning several Cds so you might want to burn to a rewritable Cd. The Nero program can be used to burn iso files.

Next create a snapshot of Borealis; which prunes out the CVS information. The utility borealis/utility/unix/create.snapshot.sh will create a snapshot in a file named borealis.tar.gz. Be sure to examine the script to see that the elements are extracted as you want. Next go into your sandbox and unroll the snapshot file.

>  rmdir      borealis nmstl
>  gunzip     borealis.tar.gz
>  tar  xvf   borealis.tar

Build Borealis using static linking. The static build script has not yet been checked in.

>  unsetenv INSTALL_NMSTL
>  build.borealis.sh
>  setenv  INSTALL_NMSTL  ${HOME}/install_nmstl
>  build.borealis.sh  -client  -tool

Before building any tests or demos you need to create a script called marshal.sh to run the marshal tool locally. This forces any generated IP addresses to be "localhost".

#!/bin/sh
${HOME}/bin/marshal.x  -l  $1  $2  $3  $4  $5  $6

${HOME}/bin>  mv  -f  marshal marshal.x
${HOME}/bin>  cp  -f  marshal.sh marshal
${HOME}>  build.borealis.sh  -test  -demo

Create a directory to construct a version of Borealis to burn. In this example it is ${HOME}/slax/static. Then create a script to modify Borealis as needed and to prune out anything not needed so that the image will fit on a Cd.

${HOME}/slax/static>  rm  -r  -f  borealis
${HOME}/slax/static>  cp  -R  ${HOME}/borealis  .
${HOME}/slax/static>  ./static.sh

Even thought static linking is used some dynamic libraries still need to be included. These will need to be included in the burnable copy of Borealis as well. They must be placed in a directory accesible via the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Here is an explanation of static linking issues.

libNMSTL.so.0       libexpat.so.1       libgslcblas.so.0    libxerces-c.so.27
libdb_cxx-4.4.so    libgsl.so.0         libstdc++.so.6

You probably will want to create a script to initialize any environment variables required and to create any aliases you'd like. For example, to run the Head or Marshal tools, youll need to include them on the PATH variable. To run the validation tests you'll need to set the VALID_REF variable to the path of a directory to hold test results.

Create a directory to construct a Slax file system to burn and copy the Slax boot cd you created there. Anything under the rootcopy/ directory will be copied to the root directory as Slax installs itself. In this case borealis will be copied to the /usr/borealis/ directory.

${HOME}/slax/base/rootcopy/usr> rmdir  borealis
${HOME}/slax/base/rootcopy/usr> cp  -R  ${HOME}/slax/static/borealis  .

Once the rootcopy is ready to burn, create an iso disc image and burn it. Then put the disc in the target machine and boot it up.

${HOME}/slax/base> rm  -f  ../borealis.iso
${HOME}/slax/base> ./make_iso.sh  ../borealis.iso

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