Frugal installs and mount-img

[williwaw]

How to make a frugal install of EasyOs
A Frugal install of Easy is no different operationally than Easy installed to a USB or dedicated disk. A frugal install has full functionality and is the preferred install method to a hardrive, when EasyOs is to share the disk with other partitions and/or existing operating systems. A frugal install is basically a folder added along side any pre-existing folders. It contains three compressed files which are extracted into RAM when Easy is booted. Any work or files saved when EasyOs is booted are saved by default in the same folder, and isolated from any other existing OS on the partition. You can also choose to mount different partitions and access or save to any location on your machine. Your existing bootloader can be configured to boot EasyOS, or a different bootlader to serve all your needs can be installed from EasyOS.

If you are installing EasyOS to an internal drive on your laptop or desktop, it's easiest to work from an EasyOs session booted from a USB drive to make the extraction. Opening an .img file in EasyOs to make the extraction only requires a left mouse click to mount. This should open two more filemanager windows. one showing the contents of the disk image boot partition, (which is not needed for making a frugal install to an existing partition), and another containing the directory easyos which can then be copied out. A second click when the copy is finished is alls that needed to unmount.

How to open an .img file with a different distro
When working from a different distro, mount-img may be used to open the EasyOs image if your distro does not provide a native way to open or mount an .img file.

The latest version of mount-img and a discussion of the script can be found here. A copy of Barrys mount-img.gz is also attached to the bottom of this post.

1. download the script and move it into a some empty directory that also contains your easy-xxx.img file.
   Remove the . gz file extension, ie. rename to mount-img

2. Open a terminal window and cd to the directory. If using the rox filemanager, click on the rox window showing the contents of the directory then press the backtick/tilde key. This should open a terminal window a with the prompt at the desired path.

3. make the script executable by running the command # chmod a+x mount-img

4. run the command # ./mount-img easy*
   this should open two more filemanager windows. one showing the contents of the disk image boot partition, (which is not needed for making a frugal install to an existing partition), and another containing the directory easyos which can then be copied out.

Bootmanagers

If you already have an EasyOs USB, look for Limine Bootloader Installer in Menu > Setup if you wish to install a new bootloader to your disk.

If you choose to use your existing boot manager on your disk instead of installing Limine, this page has an example configuration stanza if you are using Grub2.

Also from the above link,

Note, Grub4dos is not recommended, as it does not understand modern features of ext4, such as the "encrypt" feature, and if that feature is enabled, Grub4dos will not recognise the existence of that partition.

So, even if you do have Grub4dos installed, consider replacing with Limine. Limine bootloader is the "official" bootloader for EasyOS, and is available in all releases of Easy from 4.2.2 onward...

Puppy users still wishing to add an EasyOs frugal install to existing disks configured with Grub4Dos boot loader will need to create a menu.lst stanza for EasyOs.

This example presumes.....

1. grub4dos installed to a vfat or ext sda1 partition with a menu.lst stanza as shown in the code block below
2. a subfolder (in this example, /easyos) in sda2 which contains initrd, vmlinz and the easy.sfs

Code: Select all

title  EasyOs
  find --set-root uuid () 1bc0ee61-7343-4e0f-8891-f26e1bfc7fe4
  kernel /easyos/vmlinuz  rw
  initrd /easyos/initrd

where 1bc0ee61-0967-4e0f-7343-f26e1bfc7fe4 is the uuid for sda2
run the command "blkid" (without the quotes) in a terminal to find your uuid for the install partition

[ally]

neat!

[BarryK]

Yes, a good tool to have.

To clarify for everyone who reads this thread, williwaw's mount-img script is for when running a Linux distribution other than EasyOS. I know he states that in his first post, but emphasizing just in case it wasn't clear for someone.

Easy has support for mounting .img files, just click on them.

[dcung]

Last month, I downloaded and tried EasyOS 4.5.5 for first time.
I read Barry's instruction somewhere and did frugal install.
I was pleasantly surprised that it went without hiccup.

Last week or so, I was testing something and thought to get more exposure to EasyOS.
Again, frugal install. But of course, I was using different laptops. More to the point, different harddisk/SSD.
It didn't boot successfully. I knew, it's the stanza in my menu config is the likely culprit.

I 'copied' the stanza from my last successful attempt.
Then the SSD was only a single ext4 partition.

This time, I am using disks that I'm experimenting something else at the same time.
It has Windows 10, and other Debian Dogs frugal install.
I'm using 3 laptops, but all 3 has same disk structure. So, I get same error.
Can not locate easy.sfs.

I just tried this mount-img.
Would have saved me sometime extracting the frugal part...
In my case, I need a correct stanza.

This is my menu.lst
EasyOS - works when I used a single partition disk.

Code: Select all

# menu.lst produced by grub4dosconfig-v1.7
color white/blue black/cyan white/black cyan/black
timeout 10
default 2

# Windows 10
# this entry searches Windows on the HDD and boot it up
title Windows 10\nBoot up Windows if installed
  errorcheck off
  find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd  /bootmgr
  chainloader /bootmgr
  find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd  /ntldr
  chainloader /ntldr
  find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd   /io.sys
  chainloader /io.sys
  errorcheck on

title Bookworm TEST Mklive
uuid b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522
kernel /bookworm/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/bookworm/ changes=/bookworm/
initrd /bookworm/live/initrd1.xz

title Bullseye-ddog
uuid b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522
kernel /Bullseye-ddog/live/vmlinuz1 noauto from=/Bullseye-ddog/ changes=/Bullseye-ddog/
initrd /Bullseye-ddog/live/initrd1.xz

title EasyOs
#  uuid b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522
  find --set-root uuid () b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522
  kernel /easyos/vmlinuz  rw
  initrd /easyos/initrd

This is the disk structure of laptops, I'm using for testing.

gpart-scrot.png (76.03 KiB) Viewed 1170 times

[Caramel]

@dcung ,
in the line kernel of your EasyOS's stanza, the options wkg_uuid= and wkg_dir= are missing.

Here it seems that wkg_uuid=b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522 .
wkg_dir is the directory where easy.sfs initrd and vmlinuz are located

(sorry for my english)

[williwaw]

hi dc

do you have an easy USB you can boot on the laptop in question?

can you post the output from running fdisk -l in a terminal on the laptop you wish to make the new install?

and report the path to your easyos? when looking at the easyos directory in rox, It should show the full path in the titlebar.

[dcung]

@Caramel @williwaw

This stanza does the trick for me.
Thank you both of you.

Code: Select all

title EasyOs
  find --set-root uuid () b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522
  kernel /easyos/vmlinuz  rw wkg_uuid=b65748b4-748e-4247-bcd0-f134e0823522 wkg_dir=/easyos/
  initrd /easyos/initrd

It should show the full path in the titlebar.

In my case, when I specified the full path (wkg_dir), the error shows that the path double up.
And it worked, when I set it relative to root.

[BarryK]

Yes, either of these will work:

Code: Select all

wkg_dir=easyos/
wkg_dir=easyos

[rockedge]

I am interested in the usage to mount and open virtual machine qcow2 img disks.

[williwaw]

@rockedge

is "mount" and "open" always the same thing?

Code: Select all

https://gist.github.com/shamil/62935d9b456a6f9877b5