[Peeweelinux] gunzipping ramdisk

[Barry Gershenfeld]

>Thanks Barry. I was hoping to be able to make permanent changes to the
>ramdisk file while running pwl/doc. Is there any other way other than to
>uncompress the whole ramdisk file to the ramdisk? Ultimately I would
>like to make modifications to lilo.conf or any other file in pwl without
>having to pull out the DOC and doing it in a reader.     >Stephen


I don't have a DOC so my drive looks like an ordinary IDE 
drive.  I'd hope the DOC, once the right drivers are attached,
would behave similarly.  But I can't help with those 
specifics.

As I said, pwl gives various disk-making options, but I 
don't understand it well enough to know what I'm getting
without trying it and looking at the results, or to alter 
the scripts to give me a different combination.

But I am faced with the same challenge as you.  I will 
want to store altered information.  I can offer two ideas.

(1) Add a separate partition that is mounted read/write and
use that for the modified info.  You have probably seen 
discussions about this before.

(2) As for your approach, when my system boots, it does 
exactly what you are trying to do.  It says, "copying 
filesystem /dev/hda2 to /dev/ram2" and it is 
uncompressed into memory.  The running system runs from
/dev/ram2.  I can log in and I can modify
files just like you say.  The missing link then, is to
be able to compress the results into a new ramdisk image
and write it back to your disk-on-chip.  Although at this
point is doesn't seem all that different from the idea
in #(1), and perhaps more work (and risk).

I use the option "Compressed ramdisk on ext2 partition" as
the target environment to make my system.  Note that you 
can ask for an uncompressed one as well, and at least
see what size you get.

Barry