Tweaking the Tribblix ISO

For the latest release, I've made a couple of tweaks to the Tribblix ISO image.

The first is that it's now a hybrid ISO. So you should be able to write it (simply dd it) to a USB stick and use that to boot. I've never managed to both create and test a usb image, so this should be a win.

The hybrid ISO also boots under bhyve, which the old ISO never did. So that's a second win.

I didn't do any of the work here, simply taking the steps from the OmniOSce kayak build as suggested by tsoome. But the script I use is here.

The second tweak is that the man pages aren't present in their normal form on the live image. Instead, they're shipped as a compressed tarball. This saves a significant amount of space - the manuals are simple text and compress (with bzip2) really well. This doesn't make a great deal of difference to the size of the ISO, but it reduces the size of the ramdisk we boot from by 10%. And that's important because an overlarge ramdisk chews up too much memory if you're trying to install on a small (1GB or less) system.

Of course, the installer now knows to unpack the man pages during installation. This meant I had to add bzip2 to the live image, but that's tiny compared to the space saving you get in return.

I was hoping to use pbzip2, so that if you're on a multiprocessor machine the uncompression is sped up. That turns out not to be a good idea. The problem is that pbzip2 is written in C++, so needs libstdc++. I don't have that, or any of the gcc runtime, on the live image. Adding it would undo all the space savings I was trying to get, but I've not noticed any slowness.

This can be adjusted a bit. The downside is that you have no access to the manual during installation; I could easily have a small subset of the man pages available, and compress away the majority.

The two features came together, thanks to bhyve. Having an image I can boot and install on bhyve is a huge advantage, as it allows me to test the ISO and the installer much more easily. It was that testing that demonstrated that pbzip2 wouldn't work.