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This is a beta testing release of the BICK package version 0.8.0
including CDINIT version 0.8.0 (syncronized versioning).

BICK is short for "Bootable ISO Constructor Kit".  It is licensed
under the GNU Public License.  Included components are licensed under
their own licensing.

The purpose of BICK is to build a bootable ISO from a file tree.

Version 0.8.0 adds Sun Sparc booting capability.  This includes the
ability to make a single ISO image that can boot on either Intel PC or
Sun Sparc computers.  You need to have separate Intel and Sparc file
trees to do that.  This is only tested on the 32-bit Sparc.

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Instructions for downloading (if you have not already done so),
installation, setup, and ISO image building are provided in the
file called HOWTO.  BICK is still an immature project and much
work, such as documentation, still needs to be done.  Many more
changes are expected before the 1.0.0 release.

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On Intel-based El Torito boot systems, the maximum floppy emulation
size is 2.88 megabytes.  A boot loader, initial ramdisk image, and
kernel, must all be squeezed into that space.  Even with compression,
this puts a limit on the total amount of system files that may be
present.  Then if you are going to add more files via the CD-ROM,
you have to make a good choice of a specified alternate ramdisk
size to make sure that all the data to be loaded will fit, and you
have to pre-format the ramdisk image to that size as well, which
puts further constraints what goes into the floppy emulation image.

There is also a non-emulation mode for El Torito bootable systems,
but not all PC BIOSes seem to implement this.  There may also be
limitations I am not aware of since I have not actually done much
with this feature at this time.  In the future I plan to.

The CDINIT system is intended to get around this limitation.  It
uses a very small initial ramdisk just to include a console device
file for the kernel, loads TMPFS from a tar file on the CDROM, and
mounts the TMPFS as root.  CDINIT does this in 3 stages so that it
can unmap itself from first the initial ramdisk filesystem, then
second from the CD filesystem, so it can unmount them.

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Basic components:

cmd/buildiso
    This is the script to build a bootable ISO from a directory tree
    of files provided by the user.

cdinit-0.8.0
    This is the boot-time executeable parts of the CDINIT system.
    These are 3 programs which are compiled and linked statically
    with no libraries.  They include all the functions they need.
    If you modify cdinit and use the dual architecture scheme, you
    will need to compile cdinit on both platforms separately.  The
    way to compile cdinit is to type the command "./Build" in the
    appropriate directory for an architecture.  You will need to
    do this for both architectures if you want to have a CD that
    can boot on both.  Unless you are set up for cross-compiling,
    you will need to build cdinit for the foreign architecture (the
    one different from where you are building the ISO) in such a
    machine then copy the binary files back to the local machine.

syslinux-1.62
    This is the package by H. Peter Anvin which is used to make an
    MS-DOS floppy image bootable, and at boot-time, load a ramdisk
    and kernel and start things up.  This is used in the El Torito
    bootable floppy emulation image.

silo-1.2.2
    This is the boot loader for Sun Sparc.  The patch to mkisofs
    from SILO is needed.

mkisofs
    This is a patched version of mkisofs which includes SILO for the
    Sun Sparc platform.  This patch runs the SILO loader from the
    CD-ROM, which then finds and loads the appropriate kernel and
    ramdisk image.

    A new silo patch for the latest mkisofs is available via CVS if
    anyone wants to try it.

linux
    This is an included kernel image which is sorta ready to work.
    You can use your own, but for the CDINIT system, you'll need
    version 2.4.0 or later.  I'm testing with 2.4.17.  Several of
    the 2.4 kernel versions are unsafe to use.  I'm running servers
    fine on 2.4.17 and I recommend at least that version.

cdrescue
    This is a demo project containing a useable CD rescue setup.

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The cdinit program is packaged together with BICK but in a separate
directory referenced by the bick directory.  Included in the bick
directory is a file named "bick-project.tar.bz2".  This file is a
project directory template.  Untar it in the directory where the
bick directory is, so that the directory it creates is peer to the
bick directory.  Or you can untar it anywhere else if you change the
symlinks to point to the bick directory.

It is recommended to NOT build projects inside the bick directory
just to keep things clean in case you want to do additional projects.

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Feedback

Since this is a beta release, so some things might be broken.  Feedback
on problems you find is what an alpha release is all about.  Things like
"It doesn't work on my machine" are kinda useless without having your
machine, though.  Alpha releases are for people who expect to be able
to dig into the problem themselves and figure out what's wrong, if not
actually figure out what to fix.  Feedback like "it does not work" does
not do me any good (I already know it doesn't work).  Feedback like
"I got this error message ..." is at least somewhat helpful.  If you can
pin down what I did wrong, that would be most helpful.

You can send feedback to me at this email address:  bickatipaldotorg
Be sure to change at and dot appropriately.

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