[sclug] Re: sclug Digest, Vol 15, Issue 16

[Sandeep Varma]

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 16:52:44 +0000
From: David Given <dg at cowlark.com>
Subject: Re: [sclug] isolinux weirdnesses
To: sclug at sclug.org.uk
Message-ID: <200412171652.44639.dg at cowlark.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="utf-8"

On Tuesday 14 December 2004 23:43, David Given wrote:
> I'm currently constructing a live-CD-based Linux system for use as a media
> box. This is going quite well, apart from one minor problem. My CDs won't
> boot on my Shuttle box any more.

Problem solved --- or at least, worked around. It seems that the Shuttle's
BIOS doesn't like non-emulated CD boot images. It works fine if I use an
emulated floppy disk image.

This sucks, because it means that I have to have two seperate copies of the
kernel (one for booting from the CD, one for booting from a hard disk), but
at least it boots now.

Next question: is there any way to make Linux handle gracefully the case when
you unexpectedly remove an item of mounted media? Mounted read-only, of
course. I have vague memories of a kernel patch that would cause it to kill
any processes that owned file handles on the removed media, which is not
terribly suitable, but is better than spewing I/O errors...

--
+- David Given --McQ-+ "P.S. If you do not receive this, of course it
|  dg at cowlark.com    | must have been miscarried; therefore I beg you to
| (dg at tao-group.com) | write and let me know." --- Sir Boyle Roche, in a
+- www.cowlark.com --+ letter

------------------------------

>From experience with Fedora Core 3, this feature's already implemented
in there, and it works pretty efficiently. It's a combiination of 3
things, HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) D-Bus and Udev. With these
three, and the integration of them into Gnome, it's a doddle to remove
a device that's been mounted, so long as it's not in use.

If I'm correct, all three of these packages are requirements for Gnome
2.8 so if you are using that, it should be fairly easy to get
hot-swappable media running.

Hope it helps

--------------------------------

Sandeep Varma
Slough UK