Re: woody root.bin

[Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@chartermi.net>]

Hey, just now reading this thread and haven't tried it, but looks like an
excellent idea to me if it works.
i had tried modifying the woody root.bin by unzipping and mounting it and adding
the necessary files, including a statically linked brltty executable. However,
the resulting root.bin was too large, even though I had had success doing it
with potato's root.bin. Using the procedure of the brltty disk, if this works,
would stop all the bother each time a new root.bin comes out of trying to modify
it and hoping everything will fit or trying to decide what to remove. As it will
allways be possible to make the simple modification to root.bin described
without significantly increasing the size, this could be a long-term solution
instead of just a fix for doing it with woody.
Thanks.
A couple of comments on things people have written.
I know this has already been said, but i saw another question on it,
so--remember that you have to mv root.bin to root.gz and use gunzip to unzip it;
then you will find that you can mount it.
Secondly, it isn't necessary to actually install a statically linked brltty on
your system. You would just compile so it is statically linked and then transfer
the brltty executable and whatever other files you need/want. In this case, of
course you wouldn't use the install-brltty script because it will install your
/sbin/brltty (no doubt dynamically linked) instead of the brltty executable you
have created. This way you aren't changing the setup on your system in any way,
just creating what you need either to put on the root.bin or put in the brltty
disk.


as for woody, it is my impression from the debian lists that lots of
people are installing it directly rather than upgrading to it. I believe
it is mainly some security-related issues that have delayed woody's
release, but it shouldn't be a problem to install it.
As for SID, personally I would hold off a bit. I am now running SID
because I thought SID would become the testing version when woody was
released and woody was frozen so I wanted to continue upgrading. However,
apparently it isn't that straightforward. If I understood the discussion
of this on debian lists correctly, not all of the present unstable will
become testing/SID; some packages will remain in unstable while others
will form the new testing. so I'd advise you to wait until woody releases
and the smoke clears before trying a raw install either to the new testing
or unstable, but hey, if you don't mind some risk and your backups are
good enough to get you out of trouble, go for it!

Cheryl