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How to split a custom rootfs?

So I started out with slitaz 4.0 by formatting my usb drive as ext3 and then using the live usb creator in slitaz to make it bootable. I was very pleased with its performance on my old 256 kb ram machine, except for the problem that it was missing a media player. To solve this, I installed mplayer in gtkonly and then used the "tazusb writefs" feature (either in command line or right-click on the desktop), to create the root filesystem including mplayer. this file ended up being about 30 mb in size, depending on the compression used. I then made the necessary changest to the "extlinux.conf" file in the /boot/extlinux folder so that it would boot from this file intead of rootfs1.gz, rootfs2.gz..... I labeled this option "custom" in the boot menu. When I booted from the usb on my desktop computer with 512 mb ram, it worked just fine, mplayer included. However, when I tried to run it on my low ram machine, it would only boot into command line mode. I read somewhere in the forum that some lower-spec machines cannot handle loading a single large rootfs file at once, instead they need to load rootfs1.gz, rootfs2.gs etc. My question is if there is any way that  I could split my rootfs file into multiple smaller parts that my old computer can boot from. I have tried deleting unnescessary programs andrepacking the file with different compression formats, but even at about 25 mb, my old laptop still cant handle this file. Any suggestions would be awesome since I really love this distro and would like to continue using it for many years to come!

bellard

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-28

Posts: 657

Re: How to split a custom rootfs?

See http://hg.slitaz.org/tazlito/raw-file/tip/doc/tazlito.en.html#merge

$ tazlito merge 500M slitaz-mplayer.iso 160M rootfs-gtkonly.gz 48M rootfs-base.gz

Note that you can convert it to loram (both original and the 3in1)

$ tazlito build-loram slitaz-mplayer.iso loram-mplayer.iso