Currently the DoudouLinux installer just copies onto disk the Live media as is. While this is very practical for us and brings interesting features to users (rock-solid read-only system), this also has drawbacks:

  • the system is still compressed and slows down startup on old computers
  • you can not remove software
  • upgrading software creates a duplicate version of each software
  • many boot parameters cannot be changed (they're not persistent)

One of our most active contributors, Richard, suggested to use Remastersys. This is a tool whose goal is to perform full system backup onto a Live CD for Debian-based distributions. One of its features is to let users re-install a clean system onto hard disk from the Live CD: just what we need!

Thanks to it, on a laptop from 2003-2004, DoudouLinux is now booting in 40s instead of 120s from CD. I installed the system in 3 separate partitions: root, home and swap. The root system needs 1.9 GB so you have to setup at least a 2.5 GB root partition. Of course if you want to add software or don't want a separated home partition (bad idea), make it larger! Now let's look at the recipe :).

Remastersys is offered as a Debian package. The package provides a shell script to install the running Live system on disk: “remastersys-installer”. Reading the script showed that it is doing what we need. We have then successfully performed a clean install of DoudouLinux with the following operations:

  1. add Remastersys repository to a running DoudouLinux
  2. install Remastersys
  3. run the Remastersys script called “remastersys-installer”
  4. reboot!

Note that there are some issues to be corrected after the first boot (see after the source code below). We also have to customize the Remastersys script for use in an official future DoudouLinux release. In the meanwhile, if you want to test it by yourself, you need to type several code lines as root then as the main user to be able to use the graphical Gtk interface:

# log as root
su -

# define parameters
SOURCESLIST=/etc/apt/sources.list
DANSREGEXPEXCEPT=/etc/dansguardian/lists/exceptionregexpurllist
DANSSERVICE=/etc/init.d/dansguardian

# register remastersys repository
echo 'deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository debian/' >> $SOURCESLIST

# fix bug DansGuardian blocking some deb's files
# see: https://gna.org/bugs/index.php?18003
echo '\\.deb$' >> $DANSREGEXPEXCEPT
$DANSSERVICE restart

# install remastersys
apt-get update
apt-get install --assume-yes --force-yes remastersys

# call installer as normal user
exit
sudo remastersys-installer gui

Once completed, if you see messages complaining about the impossibility to unmount /TARGET and /TARGET/home, just unmount them manually in the console:

sudo umount /TARGET/home/
sudo umount /TARGET/

Finally please note that there are few details to be corrected:

  • at boot GRUB is complaining about a missing splash image
  • network may not work because the file /etc/network/interfaces is appended with another network configuration at each boot (which causes inconsistencies)
  • boot is hanging tens of seconds when network is not plugged because it is waiting for a DHCP lease

The first point can be solved by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and adding “boot” between the double slash (//) in the line speaking of splash. Note that the Remastersys splash image is not childish at all. Prefer installing the package grub-splashimages-doudoulinux instead! (and replace the file /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz)

The second one can be solved by removing the for loop of the 3rd block of code in /etc/rc.local.

The last one cannot be simply solved. We have to achieve additional experiments to find a solution. They'll be reported in the ticket related to this topic: Provide a way to do a real DDL installation.

Have nice DoudouLinux installs! ;)