Now that I'm done patting our selves in the back, I'd like to say that it was extremely fun :) After all, there is really nothing like going under the hood and getting some "machan (grease)", on a Saturday morning tinkering with Linux. For those who missed it, we had a small crowd (that is too small to mention), but made it much easier to managed and give personal attention to each attendee. Here is a summary of tasks we managed to cover:
- Presentation on the Linux kernel's boot process, from the BIOS all the way upto the runlevels, both during a normal hard drive boot and during a Live CD boot.
- Install Taprobane GNU/Linux, using the cfdisk->mkfs->cp -a method
- Create an initrd using mkinitrd and use it as a prototype to build a modifiable initrd
- Hack the initrd's /linuxrc script to drop us to a shell and play with a world before the BigBang - /sbin/init
- Presentation on using Squashfs and UnionFS to provide write support anywhere
- Creation of a squashfs file system using out live running system
- Creating the final iso and testing it using qemu
Unfortunately, our iso booted only half way before panicing, by which time we were out of time for debugging. Despite this, I hope, the attendees had a lot of fun, hacking away.