More Developer Questions

[burnme]

Had a couple more questions if you have the time to lend your expertise. First and foremost, if I am wanting to deploy an application with plop, is there a particular distro I should be picking packages for? OR is it going to be a requirement, or maybe for compatibility sake, you have to compile the app from source on the plop developers version.

Next, with the developers version, I am having trouble understanding. With the files you can download, in the tarball, is that a disk image? Something that if it was written to a disk and then used to boot it would be like we are using the same system you use to deploy plop? Or is it just a folder system we are to drop into another running linux and use its binutils and such to build out the plop disto. I know I sound like a noob, but I am having trouble getting my head around it.

What I am attempting to do is to create a base linux system that will book to the shell. From there I want to load my application. I don't want a desktop, or a window management system, in essence giving me an operating system I can drop whatever kind of system I want into it and that is what it does, custom and specific.

Hope all that makes sense, thanks a ton.
Burnme

[Elmar]

Had a couple more questions if you have the time to lend your expertise. First and foremost, if I am wanting to deploy an application with plop, is there a particular distro I should be picking packages for? OR is it going to be a requirement, or maybe for compatibility sake, you have to compile the app from source on the plop developers version.

you can take programs from any linux. the only requirement is that the program is compatible to the glibc that is used in plop linux. and you have to be sure that you also take the libraries that the program needs and not included in plop linux.

with "ldd [program file]" you see the required libs of a program. (except libs that are loaded later in the program)

compiling by yourself has a lot of advantages to taking programs from other distros. but thats another topic.

Next, with the developers version, I am having trouble understanding. With the files you can download, in the tarball, is that a disk image? Something that if it was written to a disk and then used to boot it would be like we are using the same system you use to deploy plop? Or is it just a folder system we are to drop into another running linux and use its binutils and such to build out the plop disto. I know I sound like a noob, but I am having trouble getting my head around it.

read this example before you start
http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux/fullinstall.html

you will have the same files that are used in the live version of plop linux. the binaries are bigger, because they are unstripped. maybe i will not release a developer version for every new live version release, in this case there can be also differences.

when you make a "mksquashfs /usr /usr.sqfs" and replace it with the usr.sqfs of the live version, then your live version has gcc and all other programs, libs, man files and so on of /usr.

What I am attempting to do is to create a base linux system that will book to the shell. From there I want to load my application. I don't want a desktop, or a window management system, in essence giving me an operating system I can drop whatever kind of system I want into it and that is what it does, custom and specific.

thats no problem. make a separated directory structure that has all the files you want and create new sqfs files. you should write some simple scripts to automate the sqfs creation process.

the base plop linux live version already comes without windows. so it can be a good start for you. but i am sure, there are still many programs that you will not need. simply remove it and create new sqfs files.


maybe i should also release some of my scripts to simplify the generation of a full live version of plop linux, but they are old and ugly and i have no time to rewrite them. but its not difficult to write some own scripts to create the sqfs files.