ZoneMinder Forums

Hello,

Having tried zone alarm and got tangled with the build. I thought an easier way would be to download a liveCD.
My heart sank when I saw how heavyweight the download is (and it gets bigger every release!)

I do have broadband but only 256kbits/sec.

There are many lightweight linux distros out there. As a relative newbie I am now going to ask the dumb question:-

Is it possible (maybe it is being done ) to build a bootable liveCD for zoneminder on a mean, lean distro? Aim for 60 meg download.

That way the server gets to keep its bandwidth and interested parties get something to try out and run in a nice time scale. Win win situation.

Thanks

Peter Thomas

Hi Peter,
Your is certainly not a dumb question, and your idea is not without merit. It would be a worthwhile project, and an educational challenge.
Your suggestion, in my words, would be this:
Build a livecd system with the bare bones minimum software to run a zoneminder server, and still have a user and installer interface that will anticipate and answer every question a user might come up with.
Is it possible to do this and come in at or near 60 MB. Maybe. Multi language support would probably be out of the question. If you or anyone else would like to work on this, I'll be your cheering section. And happy to help with any advice I can give.

I sort of feel compelled to explain that the "everthing plus the kitchen sink" aproach I have taken with the livecd comes from my initial motivation in creating it. I wanted an installer solution that would allow me to build a ZM server in less than half an hour, and deploy it in any environment, dial-in, stand alone, internet connected, with any printer a client might wanto to use, "can we do anything to bring out the shadows?", with a monitor or headless, "how do I use the CDRW without a monitor?", all without having to install additional software after the fact. When I was getting close to this solution for my own use, I began to think about sharing it to give something back to Phil and the whole OSS community. So I hacked together the interface, and added multi language.

So anyway there it is. If anyone feels a real need for a stipped down version, knock yourself out. Please also note to that ZM is now available as rpms for those who dont want a big download. oskin has done a great job in packaging it, and cordel has a great FC3 installer CD in the works. Mandrake 10.1 users can get rpms here:
http://www.elltel.net/melins/mdk_10.1/

Best regards,

Ross

Hi Ross,

Thanks for the reply. I am keen.

First up

How do I copy my live linux CD to hard disk so I can boot from the hard disk instead of the CD .

(somehow it must be possible to copy CD ISO image to hard disk and boot from it... maybe block copy or rawwrite....??).

I am reasonably familiar with GRUB so selecting the operating system should be OK once installed.

Best regards

Peter

Hi Peter,
If I understand your intentions correctly, you would like to remaster the CD? If so the first step is to boot from the CD and install to a partition on your your hard drive. The steps are outlined here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3779

To boot from the iso would require a virtual machine like vmware or qemu, but would be far more trouble than using a partition.

If you have no partition for this there are tools available from the installer gui to resize existing and create new partitions. There is of course the usual need to have important data backed up incase something goes wrong here, but I have found the tools pretty reliable.

The livecd install uses lilo for bootloading rather than grub. You will probably want to install the bootloader for the remaster partition in the bootsector of the partition and add an entry to you master bootloader menu to chain load this partition.

Have fun

Ross

Hi Ross,

The first step is to boot from the CD and install to a partition on your your hard drive. The steps are outlined here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3779

Ok thanks for that, I have the following information from the above link:-

To remaster the ZMliveCD you begin by installing from the CD to a partition. I use a partition 2.5 GB in size. This is enough if you can use another partition for mklivecd temp files and the final iso file. If you want to keep everything together better start with 3.5GB.

After installation is complete, reboot into the new system.


But I still do not know and understand how to install the live CD onto my new created partition. Could you provide a little more detail?

Thanks

Peter

When you boot from the CD you will see Mozilla-Firefox open to a page that has detailed, step by step instructions for installing to hard disk. Follow the instructions.