XOSL: Use or not to Use?

A simple answer is no. XOSL has been expired in terms of being fashionable anymore. Nobody took that fallen bearing after its original developer. Well, open sources mean “with no guarantee.” But actually it is not the case. That slogan is for legal formalism. I do not believe that a responsible developer means by that phrase that he has created a “crap” application. Open source developers are always around, eagerly waiting for reporting bugs from  potential end-users and happy to answer their questions and helping them. One way of becoming rich and a reputable corporate owner or highly demanded employee is to develop high quality, open source, free products. But if a day comes that they say, “Well, now we have some other business and do not have a time to take care of our open product and nobody is interested to continue professionally to support our free applications," then after a certain period of time one cannot and should not use that goods anymore. It is only good for gaining experience, gaining familiarity with some principle or historical background. After that, one should go to living products with the developers around to interact in case. This is why I leave XOSL and go to GRUB boot loader. My XOSL worked fine from the within of an extended partition on a logical partition there and could load a GRUB boot loader for a Linux “Debian” flavour “ex2” partition.

Writing GParted GRUB Menu

To write the menu for the GRUB we have to invoke a text editor and write the menu.lst file. “Debian” command line has the “nano” editor, same as “pico” Hence, I can use either name. At the command prompt I enter “pico /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst” When  the editor opens I write down the following lines. I am careful not to leave spce after end of each line and not a line skipped between line. Only between each section I leave a line. each section starts with the phrase, “title”
default 0
title GParted live
root (hd0,0)
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 toram boot=live union=aufs noswap noprompt vga=normal ip=frommedia
initrd /live/initrd1.img
boot

title CDROM
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/grub/memdisk
initrdl /boot/grub/sbootmgr.dsk

kernel is the core of each operating system loaded to do house keeping jobs such as delegating jobs to the the hardware and doing their requests. initrd job is to intialize physical memory of computer that is to put the image of operating system in RAM. This image is called the system and its job is to boot or make the computer live. I remember that I had the required files “memdisk” and “sbootmgr.dsk” on my customized GParted ISO.  I use the copy command
“cp –pf /live/image/memdisk  /mnt/boot/grub/memdisk” and
“cp –pf /live/image/sbootmgr.dsk  /mnt/boot/grub/sbootmgr.dsk” to copy these two files into the grub boot file. They load GParted from the GParted CD instead of GParted hard disk partition if I opt to. Let me tell you I can add more sections to this grub menu to load any further operating system from GParted partition and add a nice splash to the menu with cool listing and get rid of XOSL! So why not? It is because I do experiment with tools to become more efficient.

Creating Partition on Virtual Box

After finishing on creating partition, it is a good idea to roam around “Debian” and become used to its environment. Just enter “ls”  to get a list of facilities that I got on the root. if I enter “ls /sbin” I’ll get a list of loads of utilities available for me. One is “mke2fs” that creates Ext2 file system for Linux partition. I can remember that I liked to install permanently a GParted on an extended logical partition at the beginning of my hard disk. I enter “mke2fs –L GParted /dev/hda6” at the command prompt. It does its job and creates a Linux partition on my hda6 logical device. I use option “–L GParted” to have a volume label for my partition, besides. I notice always to keep the required blank spaces. before and after that option in the command and after “L”. Now I run an “–pfv e2fsck /dev/hda6” to have some expert information about my logical device. Again those switches help me to keep things under control and unattended. I should plan everything ahead and leave them to be done without having  been around to watch them. At the end I can read the report or any log file to find out what has gone. So “unattended but verbose” is desired. Now it is time to “mount” the logical partition on a directory. I can create any directory that I like, but already there is a directory in “Debian” for that: it is “/mnt” directory on the root. I enter “mount /dev/hda6 /mnt”. At times it is necessary to use “mount –t ext2 /dev/hda6 /mnt” to explicitly guide the commands to the type of mounted partition. Now, everything is fresh and clean and I do not need to do that. I have the device mounted now I start to install my own image and directories. I follow advise of GParted site. I should decompress GParted.zip into the root of “/mnt”. I should find the place of “unzip” command and gparted .zip on the CD image that right now I have live on the RAM disk space. If I enter just “ls” I see a “live” folder in the list. I enter “cd live” that takes my inside the “live” directory. There I have two folders: “cow” and “image” I enter “cd image” Here is the list of all files and folders that I put when I was creating my custom GParted CD ROM. Among them now I need gparted.zip and “unzip”. They are here. Now I follow GParted website command but I should have all paths in commands. Alternatively I can copy these two files to the root of “Debian live RAM” I enter “/live/image/unzip /live/image/gparted.zip –d /mnt”. I note that I should repeat the complete path for each file and folder and unzip is completely case sensitive. Switch “ – d” shows the directory of installation. I did whatever GParted advised. From here, or at the root I check “ls /mnt” and find out every thing is as it should. I have “COPYING” file at the root. From now on it works on the hard disk but now I am in a logical partition and have other plans hence I need a “GRUB” for loading this device from “XOSL” I go into the root and enter “mkdir /mnt/boot” That creates the required “/boot” directory for installing “GRUB”. Then I enter “/sbin/grub-install ––no-floppy ––root-directory=/mnt /dev/hda6 ” Switch –no-floppy shows that I do not use a floppy for loading “—root-directory=/mnt is the place that “GRUB” finds its “/boot” directory as already created and ready and at the end we have installing device. Usually “GRUB” gives a warning about “device.map” that should be ignored. I can inspect “ls /mnt/boot/grub” for installed folders. It is better to sort out things by invoking GRUB command environment by entering “sudo grub” There at the “grub>” prompt, I enter  “find /bbot/grub/stage1” It replies “(hd0,5)” It is in the brackets and I know that it means the partition number 6 (5+1) on the device number 1 (=0+1). Grub counts from zero rather than one. Then at the “grub>” prompt I enter “root (hd0,5)” It replies “file system type is ext2fs, partition type ex83” both have the same meaning. Then I enter “setup (hd0,5)” It gives few lines of message and news of successful installation. Then I enter “quit” and back to “Debian” command prompt. So far so good. Now remains to edit the “menu.lst” of GRUbB and a nice splash for it.

Using Virtual Drives

You see, for so many tests I can't burn Cd's and DVDs and then revise my things and throw those out and burn new items. I make everything virtual. I have Daemon Tools from here . There are numerous similar free software for this purpose. With Daemon Tools you can setup virtual DVD drives without actually having need to a hardware. You can put an ISO image on these virtual drives and test it. When I am installing these tools always I am vigilant to custom install them, and to prevent installing items that later might become annoying for me. I do not like having shortcut icons on my desktops and loading memory and CPU with quick launch processes.

GParted Has Commandline Linux

I always had two floppies of Basic Linux 3 to work on command line Linux. Now by permanent installing of GParted I have a more powerful tools. In due time I write what should be added to these tools to make them more ideal. For that reason I selected a more relax space for GParted. I also couldn't use the tools available in this minimalist Debian to unzip GParted.zip downloaded for installing on hard disk. Gunzip and Zcat give "more than one entry point" error. They cannot decompress Gzipped by "7Z" either. Curtis Gedak from GParted kindly instructed me, by private communication, that to use good old free "Zip" and "Unzip" from here. I selected "unz550x-glibc.zip" from the list. From the unzipped folder I only need to have the file "unzip," some hundred kilo bytes. Other pieces could be useful but not right now.Later I should inject this to GParted CD iso image that I have together with other things.

Installing GParted and XOSL on FAT partitions

Alternative way, I liked is to use GParted for all partitioning jobs. I put Gparted Live CD and restarted computer. I select safe mode from the menu. It is more comfortable for sight to have vga normal rather than default vga=791 or whatever it is. In the menu of Gparted I delet any partition I had done from XP, but the XP's NTFS partition. I keep my XP untouched and then choose an extended partition, something more than 4GB from the beginning of the unallocated space. I selected "Lab" as its name since it is the place that I can experiment. For the logical partitions inside the extended partition I started from a default minimum of 16Mb for XOSL that comes out later as an actual 24Mb. I format it as FAT16 partition. It is more than enough for XOSL. Second logical drive I partition in the menu is a 120Mb for permanent residence of GParted with FAT32 format. I leave a 4Gb for FreeDos. If I can find my installed partitions on a DOS prompt by "fdisk" I will find partition letters "C:," "D:" and "E:" for these three new partitions, respectively. Now I should install XOSL and GParted. For XOSL installation I need to have any DOS bootable floppy that gives me a DOS prompt A:\> that is all. I put the entire XOSL folder inside this floppy. When I restarted after Gparted partitioning job I put this diskette immediately in the floppy drive to reboot from the diskette. When A:\> prompt comes I "cd," that is I change directory to XOSL and then I type "INSTALL." After that I follow and accept all defaults. I am careful to have "C" as installation partition. I can change it by toggling "Page Up" on my keyboard, but I don't. When it reboots I configure it to be able to boot from GParted partition or from FreeDos or from XP or from a floppy drive and, of course, any future operating system that I might decide. I check the box for XP to be my default boot and select a hot key such as "x" key for accelerated booting. I'll have XOSL on my hard drive installed forever and whatever happens in future, even if I want to fresh install other things, it remains there. I check "My Computer" to see what letters XP has chosen for new partitions. I notice it has selected "E" for "XOSL" and "H" for GParted and "I" for FreeDos partition. It has left "F" and "G" for my other hard disk drives. I go to disk manager and change "XOSL" to "P" and Gparted to "Q" to keep them away from other drives and daily unwanted manipulations. Now I should install GParted and make it permanent, as well. I go to my XP. From here I downloaded a zipped version of GParted for hard disk drives. Inside that, when unzipped to a folder in any place in XP, there are three folders: "live," "syslinux" and "utils." Inside utils from the folder "Win32" I copy "syslinux.exe" and paste it in "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner" to be accessible from XP command prompt. Then I go to "start" in the XP and "Run" from the right hand pane. When the "Run" dialogue comes usually is on its default "cmd" or in the last command that has been run. In the later case I change it back to "cmd" command and then I "OK" button. In the command prompt window I type "syslinux.exe -sfa Q:" where "Q" is the designated partition for GParted. In this way I install "ldlinux.sys" on Gparted partition to make it linux bootable. Then from the unzipped folder of GParted I copy three folders "live," "syslinux," and "utils" and drop them in the "Q" drive such that they sit on the root of the drive. Now, if I restart and I go to menu of XOSL, I can choose to boot it in GParted partition and voila Gparted boots to its menu and I have it permanently for any future manipulations of hard disks.