[Voyage-linux] Create an img file

[Edwin Whitelaw]

If you've loaded the customized image onto a bootable CF, you can put 
the CF back in your reader and run:

Assuming your CF is mounted as /dev/sda and you are saving the image in 
/usr/src/

dd if=/dev/sda of=/usr/src/<filename.img> bs=<your choice>

will create the file /usr/src/<filename.img> as an image of the CF.

You may want to experiment with the bs=  (block size) to get the best 
speed though I've found the process isn't terribly fast (using USB 1.1 
anyway :-( ).  It does allow you to have a canned image that can be put 
on a fresh CF without much effort.  Note that the size of the source CF 
must be <= the target CF and if you use a larger target, the image will 
still be the size of the source, ie, if you dd a source that was 
installed on a 256MB CF onto a 512MB flash, you'll get a 256MB system 
installed on the larger flash.

I've found the install procedure to actually work faster though it does 
presume the ext2 filesystem is already set up on the CF (not that hard 
to script separately or even add to the install scripts.) and doesn't 
create the artificially smaller system when run against the ever larger 
CFs that are available. 

If you unpack a tarball and then do the chroot customization process to 
install/remove packages, set passwords, DNS, etc., etc. then tar it back 
up, you have a more flexible snapshot of a given setup, IMO.

HTH,

Edwin

andrew at purewireless.net wrote:
> I have a need to create a .img file out of my customized voyage install. I
> am using linux so how would I go about creating a .img file?
>
>
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Edwin Whitelaw, P.E.
New River Valley Unwired, LLC
2200 Lonesome Dove Dr
Christiansburg, VA 24073
540-239-0318