2010 July | Computer and Technology News Blog

Jul 03

I needed a custom install disc for CentOS 5 in order to bundle some additional RPMs. Revisor has the promise, but it remains unstable and mostly unusable many months after I first gave it a shot. So until they knock out those issues, here are the instructions for rolling your own. I couldn’t find anything specific to C5, so based this loosely on some CentoS 4.1 instructions. Since a few of the tools have been updated since that release, I figured someone else could benefit.

Grab Disc 1 of the CentOS 5 installer and download to your machine.

Copy the contents to your hard drive:

$ mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /media/c5disc1
$ mkdir ~/build/c5disc1
$ cd/media/c5disc1
$ tar -cf – . | ( cd ~/build/c5disc1 ; tar -xvpf – )
$ umount /media/c5disc1

NOTE: Make sure you have the file .discinfo in ~/build/c5disc1. If it’s missing, the ISO will fail with a very non-intuitive error that: “The CentOS CD was not found in any of your CDROM drives. Please insert the CentOS CD and press OK to retry.” This file is apparently critical to how anaconda reads the file, but it’s not trapping that error in a useful way. Oh well. Just copy it from the original disc and put it in your build root, and all will be well.

Make sure you have the anaconda packages:

$ sudo yum -y install anaconda anaconda-help anaconda-runtime

Copy the custom packages into the new folder:

$ cp mypackage-x.y-z.i386.rpm ~/build/c5disc1/CentOS

Here’s where things start to differ from the C4 instructions. The createrepo command wraps some of the individual steps previously needed (the entire Step 4 from the C4 post), so all you need to do is:

$ cd ~/build/c5disc1
$ discinfo=`head -1 ~/build/c5disc1/.discinfo`
$ createrepo -u “media://$discinfo” -g repodata/comps.xml ~/build/c5disc1

Make the ISO using this command set:

$ isofilename = ~/build/c5-custom.iso
$ mkisofs -r -R -J -T -v \
-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
-V “My Custom Linux 1.0″ -p “Cool Dude” \
-A “My Custom Linux 1.0 – 2007/12/11″ \
-b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
-x “lost+found” -o $isofilename ~/build/c5disc1
$ implantisomd5 $isofilename

To quickly test your new ISO, use qemu (as outlined in another post)

That’s it, so good luck!

How to Install Android on an iPod touch 1G

Jul 03

After finding that there was really no decent guide on how to install Android on an iPod Touch, I decided to write one.

NOTICE: this guide will be updated soon, but it iDroid itself requires more updates.

What you will need:
An iPod Touch 1g running 3.1.2 jailbroken with blackra1n
Vmware Workstation (If you want to install with windows, not sure if Vmware Player works.)
Ubuntu 10.04 Download here
Openiboot Download here
iDroid (Taken down for the moment)
Winscp Download here
iFunboxDownload here
OpenSSH (Installed from Cydia on your iPod touch)
Libreadline, Libusb, and pthread need to be installed on Ubuntu. (All 3 can be downloaded from the package manager.)

Alright, so I start here assuming you have the above. Please note that 3.1.2 iPods jailbroken with redsn0w may or may not work, but I recommend using balckra1n as redsn0w did not work for me.

First we will install OpeniBoot, get it from the link.
First, make a folder in your home directory named openiboot, move the files from the download above into the openiboot folder. Now, open a terminal (under applications, accessories) and type “cd ~/openiboot” without the quotes. Next, type “sudo su” (for the rest of this section, do not type the commands with the quotes around them). Enter your password that you use to sign in to linux (don’t be afraid if you don’t see yourself typing anything, its a security feature). Now then, we get to installing openiboot. Plug your iPod touch in with recovery mode (shows up as connect to itunes on your iPod). In VMware, go to the VM tab, go to removable devices, and look for anything saying apple device or iPod. On that, click “Connect (Disconnect from Host)”. Now, in terminal type “./loadibec openiboot.img3″. You should see openiboot come up on your iPod Touch. On your iPod Touch, click the top left button once, so you highlight Console. Now, click your home button. On linux, in terminal, type “./oibc” quickly after doing that last step. You should see the text on your iPod come up in the linux terminal. When you see “Welcome to OpeniBoot” type “install” into the terminal. You should it start to install, so wait a few minutes until it is completed. Congratulations, you have installed OpeniBoot and finished the first part of the tutorial!

Now then, to get Android installed
Take the 6 files from the zip you downloaded (android.img.gz, cache.img, ramdisk.img, system.img, userdata.img, and zimage) and put them in a place you will remember. Next, open up iFunbox and navigate to root file system/private/ and copy those 6 files into the var folder (root file system/private/var). Make sure that the 6 files are exactly the same size as the files on your computer, as this is an annoying part to screw up on. Now that that is done, open up winscp. But before you can do anything with that, go to your iPod Touch and find your IP address (Press the blue arrow in Wifi Settings). Now, copy the IP address into the winscp “host name” box. Then put the name “root” as username, and the password “alpine” as the password. Now, before connecting, change the file protocol to scp. Then, press login. It should take a moment, then display your iPod Touch directories on the right side of the screen. Navigate to private/var and check that all 6 files are there. Now, right click each file, select properties, and change the permissions to 777 (make sure the first 3 rows of boxes are selected).

Turn your iPod Touch off, and then on, and OpeniBoot should come up. Select Android, and it should boot. After boot, please follow the instructions here.