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Empty Crust 1.0.7

by PizzasGood

Empty Crust is a barebones version of Puppy 1.0.7. Basically, Mozilla, the sound libs, pdf junk, and many other things were torn out. Basic utilities, gftp, pupget, and an enhanced Dillo were left. It is roughly 45 megabytes. The name is because it's like being supplied with an empty crust and being allowed to build your own custom pizza upon it (the reason for the pizza reference is due to its creator's "slight" insanity.)

EmptyCrust107.1.iso∞
Checksum∞
Removed Package List∞

Forum Topic∞


Stuff to Know

Changes
Alterations

Additions

Removals

Removed Packages (99 total)




How Empty Crust 1.0.7 Was Made


Intro
Where do Puplets come from? Where do you think? An albatross of course! Perhaps you were expecting the stork, but that's just an old wives tale. But where does the albatross get the Puplets? Well, you see, there is a standard Puppy that Barry Kauler makes. Don't ask me where he gets it from, it's out of the depths of his mind or something. But, sometimes people decide the standard Puppy doesn't suit a particular task as well as it could. That's when they decide to make Puplets. Puplets are just tweaked versions of the standard Puppy.
But how do people make those Puplets? Well, by remastering Puppy. That generally involves using a program to let them add and remove packages, then sewing Puppy back up into a Franken Puppy, which we call a Puplet. The methods vary from person to person and Puplet to Puplet. What I'm going to do is explain how I made the Empty Crust 1.0.7 Puplet.


The first thing I did was whip out my trusty HackyRemaster script. Sounds like an oxymoron, eh? I mainly called it hacky because I hacked it out of Barry's old scripts while adding my own "improvements." It turns out to work just fine if you like to do things the hard way. Basically, it extracts image.gz and usr_cram.fs and combines them into a full Puppy filesystem. Then it lets you edit to your heart's content. When you're finished, it puts it all back togeather again.

Okay, so now I had Puppy's guts spread out and ready for removal. I could have done it by hand, but I didn't feel like it. I'm going to explain how to do it by hand first, though, so you can do it in case you ever have too.

To remove one of Puppy's packages, you need to know which files to remove. So, unless you just instinctively know, you'll have to download the package in question and extract it. Then, you look through the resulting filetree, noting all the files. Make sure you don't miss any hidden files either. Then, you go through the filesystem of the Puplet and remove those files.
There might also be an image or two in the root area of the extracted package. Those can be found in either /usr/share/pixmaps or /usr/share/min-icons.
If there is a file called puninstall.sh, you'll want to open that up and see what it does also. It is the uninstall script for that package.
Once you get done removing the files, you're going to need to edit /root0/.packages/packages to turn that particular package off. Once you find it in the list, if you look at all the jibberish to the right, you'll see that it's really info about the package. One of the words will be on. Change it to off.
Now, you need to deactivate any menu entries for that package. You'll want to do this the easy way. Look for a file called keyword. Now open a terminal and type
fixmenus /path/to/root0 -packagename
but replace /path/to/root0 with the path to the root0 directory of the remaster, and packagename with the text within the keyword file. The - means to remove. If you wanted to put it back, you'd have a + there instead.

Okay, that's the hard way. How I did it was to modify PupBeGone to remove packages from the remastering directory rather than /. It made things much faster.

Okay, so that's how to remove stuff. Now, I had to install things.

Now, I didn't install any unleashed packages, but if I did it would have been like this:
Download. Extract. Put stuff where it goes, using the above instructions to find out where they go. Do the stuff in a pinstall.sh script. Run fixmenus as above, but with a + instead of a -. Change the off in /root0/.packages/packages to on.

I did install a dotpup or two. Those can be tricky, and are hard to give instructions for since they are all different. Basically, you run unzip on them. Then you look at dotpup.sh to find out what else happens. Usually there is a dotpup.tar.gz with the filesystem in it much like with an unleashed package. Just follow what it does and you should be fine, though.

One thing you need to be consious of when adding/removing stuff is symlinks. Be sure you don't overwrite a symlink to a directory with an actual directory (unless you mean to). I did that with /etc (it's linked to /root0/.etc) by accident and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't boot. It happens when you think directories should merge, but they hit a symlink. So watch out.

Okay, now I had everything removed and installed. What was left? Tweaking. I swapped out a couple icons to make it look better. They can usually be found in /usr/share/pixmaps or /usr/share/min-icons. I also had to edit the default applications, since I had removed some. So, I went to /usr/local/bin and edited the appropriate files (defaulttexteditor, defaultbrowser, etc.). Next, I wanted a different wallpaper, so I went to /usr/share/backgrounds and put the ones I wanted in there. Then I went to /etc/background and edited it appropriately (actually, I did more than that because I installed the Mo-Betta Wallpaper-Setta, but not much more. I basically pointed it to a symlink called wallpaper instead of the actual image). I also gave some bookmarks to Dillo by placing them in /root0/.dillo.

Okay, that's fine and dandy. But what about that pesky desktop? How do I eliminate those icons that I don't need? Well, you go to go to /root0/Choices/ROX-Filer/PuppyPin and open it with a text editor. Within, you can see all the icons, where they go, what they do, etc. Just edit that to how you want it and you're good to go. Alternately, you could set up your desktop how you want it, the copy your PuppyPin to the Puplet. Also in that directory is a file called options. It has the options for Rox, such as text color and style or thumbnail settings.

Well, that's pretty much it for the non-existant guts of Empty Crust. Next, I used HackyRemaster to recompress the filesystem. Before I put the iso back togeather though, I wanted to do some more tweaking. I edited isolinux.cfg in the iso, which is what interprets your choice at the boot menu. HackyRemaster can do basic changes to this, but it is configured for an older Puppy and a differently constructed menu, so the choices wouldn't have matched the menu. So, I edited it by hand to us pupMINI and the correct size. Then I edited boot.msg with a text editor. That is the file that displays the actual menu. I didn't do much, just added "Empty Crust" to the top so you could tell it apart from the standard Puppy.

With the tweaking done, I used HackyRemaster to rebuild the iso, burned it, and uploaded it. Bingo bango bam.
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Page History :: 2008-01-03 19:26:06 XML :: Owner: PizzasGood :: Search:
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