User Feedback :: new extensions in 0.7



ke4nt1,
Thanks very much for your post-very educational!!
I'm having trouble with mplayer.deb and mydsl saying (at boot time)
that /etc/skell can't be written to.Other stuff - abiword.dsl and firefox.tar.gz
come up o.k.
That aside,I read your post and thought I'd try to look at mplayer.deb and
repack it,but could you clarify something for me please?
If these xxx.debs are really xxx.tar.gz files,then your example appears
initially to "untar" the xxx.deb (but not "ungzip" it) ,make changes,
then tar the directories,and gzip the resultant xxx.tar.
When I do this on mplayer.deb, I end up with a mplayer.tar that is a little
bit larger than the original mplayer.deb, then after gzipping, something
very very much smaller.
About now I get the feeling I'm missing something very obvious to all
but myself,but would appreciate your advice.

Thanks,
Adraker
adraker

The line in the above post....
tar xzvf xgammon.dsl
Both ungzips and untars the .dsl file...

This post only refers to .dsl files...  not .deb files..
".dsl" files  ARE ".tar.gz" files , simply renamed.

When installing a .deb , perhaps thru apt-get.
You can "dpkg -L  whatever.deb"
to get a list of files the .deb installed on your system.

A step further ,"dpkg -L whatever.deb > whatever.txt"
will make a text file for you to adjust and edit to build your .dsl

Edit out all of the doc, man, lines in the file, along with their
paths... for example

/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/anty.exe
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/anty.doc

the only line you would leave in this example is.
"/usr/bin/anty.exe"

Edit this file, only leaving in the necessary items.

Then, add these 3 lines to your txt file..
Of course, you have to had already made them earlier!...

Add your /home/damnsmall/.xtdesktop/whatever.lnk
Add your /home/damnsmall/.xtdesktop/whatever.png
Add your /tmp/mydsl.menu/whatever ( remember to
closely follow the earlier post on this item )

Before building, I will check to see if there is any other
items to add , like other skins, for programs, or other
backgrounds, for themes, and so on...

Double-check that your tmp file is rwxrwxrwx !
run "chmod 777 tmp" from the directory your tmp is in.

Once you have the "whatever.txt" edited to your liking, then
"cat whatever.txt | xargs tar -cvf - | gzip > whatever.dsl"
Then you' ll have a .dsl file to test... you can actually end the
"cat" line in whatever.dsl, but for this example it demonstrates.

For the mplayer, the /etc/skel did the same to me, I simply
copied those files in it over to the .mplayer directory, and
deleted the /etc/skel and files in it.  Still works, no problem.
The /etc/skel is usually a template for creating new users...

And you seeing the resulting .dsl file much smaller than
the .deb file is correct!
That's the idea, to get it as small as possible..

Thanks to all who have helped make these posts possible..
and Thanks for the many replies, either posted or mailed...

73
ke4nt
ke4nt1,

Why on earth did I type "mplayer.deb" when I meant "mplayer.dsl"?
It was late, I was a goose, and didn't notice.No offence to any actual
geese reading this post.
I'll try the last part of your post after the live cd runs up.

Thanks for your reply!

Adraker
mplayer musings....

Couldn't get anywhere with mplayer.dsl from repository.Removed handfulls
of hair.After looking around forums,I started up a standard dsl-0.7 cd,
and ran this "mkwriteable" script in /etc/init.d .Made a directory in home,
copied in the 2 .tar.gz files pertaining to mplayer from another distro starting with "L" and untarred them.This gave an etc and usr folder, but with much
more content than the MP.dsl from the repository.
I copied every file from these folders to their counterpart directories in
ramdisk,with the exception of /etc/skel which was still not entertaining the
idea of being written to.
Mplayer worked and gmplayer more or less worked.I'll make another cd
with these tar.gz in a special folder....to have a dsl with mplayer,abiword,
and firefox is my holy grail!!
I am not seeing any issue with mplayer. Works fine here. The instructions ke4nt1 posted are for those interested in making their own dsl extensions. If you just want to use extensions, you don't have to burn cds. Read "Getting Started" section on myDSL. Place the download extension in a hard drive partition and boot regular dsl0.7 cd with boot option of mydsl=hdxx.  Where xx is approriate for your system. I am using mplayer, abiword, and firefox. When you are happy with your choices, then you can burn a myDSL self booting, self configuing cd.
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