Boot Debian Jessie using Slacko and grub4dos

[gerry]

I have an IBM Thinkpad T60, triple booted with Slacko 5.7, Mint 17.1, and just installed Debian Jessie.

Because Grub2 does not see a Puppy Frugal Install when it is looking for installed systems to make the Grub config and menu, I use Slacko and Grub4dos to look after booting. When I had only Mint as well as Slacko, it worked fine, Grub4dos found Mint and made the correct Menu file. But now that I've installed Debian, there is a problem. In Debian, there are two symlinks in the root directory, one pointing to /boot/vmlinuz-<version>, and the other to /boot/initrd.<version>. Grub4dos finds the symlink, which always has the same name, but points to the latest vmlinuz and initrd files in /boot/.

Both Slacko and Mint see the initrd symlink as broken, although Debian itself does not. It seems that the symlink is an absolute one, which does not work with the initrd target, which is initrd.img<etc>.

So in the Debian root directory, I changed the absolute symlink to a relative one. All you have to do is remove the first slash in the target address-
/boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-4-686-pae becomes

boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-4-686-pae

Now both Mint and Puppy can see the img in /boot/, and grub4dos can boot Debian.

It must be something to do with the fact that initrd is a disk image, rather than a file as usual.
The snag is that when there is a Debian update, the initrd image version may change, so I'll have to edit the link again. I don't see Debian staying long- especially as all I wanted was to have a look at Gnome3- I don't like it!

Gerry

[Pelo]

use Pupjibaro jessie, it's a Puppy Debian, with debian apps available from its packages manager Try it, it's a nice Puppy jessie, really nice.

[gcmartin]

Other may post the link(s), but you CAN boot a frugal PUP using GRUB2. As well you can boot a PUP directly from its ISO using GRUB2, should you choose.

[Flash]

Other may post the link(s), but you CAN boot a frugal PUP using GRUB2. As well you can boot a PUP directly from its ISO using GRUB2, should you choose.

How? Remember, this is a how-to.

[gcmartin]

Dont know where I got this from, but I had this in my old notes for GRUB2

These 4 lines of commands that one can use as a generic pattern in the GRUB 2's mini-shell, i.e., the loopback-linux-initrd-boot sequence plus some argument(s) passed to the given kernel, for example, to bootstrap as many popular Linux ISO images as possible (in this case is with 3 kernel commandline arguments for System Rescue CD):

Code: Select all

loopback lb (hd0,gpt3)/myUserAccount/download/systemrescuecd-x86-3.7.0.iso
linux (lb)/isolinux/rescue64 isoloop=systemrescuecd-x86-3.7.0.iso setkmap=us docache
initrd (lb)/isolinux/initram.igz
boot

The loopback part of the generic pattern is not, strictly speaking, mandatory for Linux, when you intend to install a Linux distro such as a Debian derivative without wasting an optical disc

Not specific to Puppy. But, as I remember, GRUB2 Frugal boot has been shared on the forum.

[gcmartin]

Also found these, as well via a search:

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Post your final solution that fits your needs, when complete. Feel free to ask questions as several members in this community have experience with GRUB2.

[rufwoof]

Don't know if this is of any help, I boot DebianDog Jessie using grub4dos and my (manually edited) menu.lst (that needs tidying up) looks like :

# menu.lst (grub4dos)
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
timeout 1
default 2

title Debian-Jessie 32bitpae JWM (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/livejwm/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/livejwm/ changes=EXIT:/livejwm/live/
initrd (hd0,2)/livejwm/live/initrd1.xz
boot

title Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/ changes=EXIT:/live/ init=/bin/systemd
initrd (hd0,2)/live/initrd1.lzo
boot

title Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/ changes=EXIT:/live/ init=/bin/systemd fsck
initrd (hd0,2)/live/initrd1-lz4-addon
boot

title copy to ram Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/ changes=EXIT:/live/ init=/bin/systemd copy2ram fsck
initrd (hd0,2)/live/initrd1-lz4-addon
boot

title copy to ram Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/ changes=EXIT:/live/ init=/bin/systemd copy2ram fsck
initrd (hd0,2)/live/initrd1.lzo
boot

title copy to ram Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/ changes=EXIT:/live/ init=/bin/systemd copy2ram fsck
initrd (hd0,2)/live/initrd1
boot

title copy to ram Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/ changes=EXIT:/live/ init=/bin/systemd copy2ram fsck
initrd (hd0,2)/live/initrd1.xz
boot


title DebianDog-Jessie - Always Fresh
root (hd0,2)
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 from=/ nomagic base_only norootcopy
initrd /live/initrd1.xz

title DebianDog-Jessie (asks at shutdown to create save file)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 from=/
initrd /live/initrd1.xz

title SAFEMODE Debian-Jessie 32bitpae openbox (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/live/SAFEMODE/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/live/SAFEMODE changes=EXIT:/live/SAFEMODE/live/
initrd (hd0,2)/live/SAFEMODE/live/initrd1.xz
boot

I switched from init boot to systemd boot some months back (liked it and stuck with it). I dropped the third one (counting from zero) that copies to ram just a week or so ago as I'm now remastering using no compression and the remastered file is around 1.4GB (versus around half that if compressed), which on a 2GB system is a bit large IMO to be copied to ram at bootup.

DebianDog Jessie is Debian Jessie, but with the puppy like wrapper around that to enable frugal booting and optional persistence (saves etc). Of the two jwm and openbox I personally prefer openbox now. Not as lightweight as jwm, but not far off and has easier GUI management of its configuration.

Love it. As you have all of Debian Jessie repository - that work well together and are very stable (albeit not the latest versions of programs), get updates/security patches come through very quickly, but retain all of the frugal puppy like functionality. Best of both worlds. Save to folder type puppy style (/live/changes in my case, but I tend to keep that empty i.e. remaster whenever changes are preserved into the main 01-filesystem.squashfs (main sfs).

[learnhow2code]

As you have all of Debian Jessie repository - that work well together and are very stable (albeit not the latest versions of programs), get updates/security patches come through very quickly, but retain all of the frugal puppy like functionality. Best of both worlds.

as long as we are talking about the best of both worlds, i hope this process can be used with devuan. it probably can quite easily, and you will (i believe, based on first-hand experience) get farther with devuan than debian jessie + sysvinit. (likewise, you will probably get farther with debian than you will with devuan jessie + systemd.)

if this is taken as a challenge, i am not telling you to not use systemd. you should use systemd if you want to. like it says in this post, i would like to see this trick apply to devuan also-- i am not demanding you make it work that way, let alone that you run it that way yourself.

wanted to clarify that ahead of time something like:

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title Devuan-Jessie 32bitpae XFCE (sda3) save on EXIT
root (hd0,2)
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.7-1-686-pae noauto from=/boot/ changes=EXIT:/boot/
initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd.img-3.16.7-1-686-pae
boot