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Building 64 bit lzma file

Meilix contains the kernel and casper file in image-i386.tar.lzma. This lzma is a compression method for files. It provides a high compression ratio and fast decompression.

Lzma files contains the Meilix file system, we get the same content inside it which we get when when we mount an ISO file. Lzma file is basically an image of the Meilix Operating System.

Solution:

We need to build a lzma file of 64 bit for Meilix. If we extract the lzma file we will find a README file which contains all the information of the ISO used to build this lzma file.

When we search through the files we find a file named README.diskdefines which contains the information of the file system.

#define DISKNAME  Lubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release i386
#define TYPE  binary
#define TYPEbinary  1
#define ARCH  i386
#define ARCHi386  1
#define DISKNUM  1
#define DISKNUM1  1
#define TOTALNUM  0
#define TOTALNUM0  1

The first line depicts that name and version of the ISO with the architecture from where this file system has been taken.

So we thought to build the same system with release amd64.

We download the ISO and tried to compress it into lzma.tar.

Decompression of lzma.tar file is easy but to compress a file into lzma.tar is done as follows:

When using tar, the first word after -f is the output filename

tar -c --lzma -f foo.tar.lzma sourcefile(s)

We mounted the lubuntu 12.10 64 bit ISO and copied it into another folder. Then tried to compress it with lzma algorithm. It resulted in a big size file which can’t be pushed to Github.

So we find out that a file name filesystem.casper is largest in size and can also be removed. Therefore we removed that file and build the ISO again and pushed.
We tested the ISO and file that the build is working file.

Changes made:

  • One we need to push the 64 bit lzma
  • We need to edit this line in build.sh of Meilix

# Arch to build ISO for, i386 or amd64
arch=${1:-i386}

Finally we got the file as image-amd64.tar.lzma

So, if we look into the Readme file we can found the version which it used for building the zip.

#define DISKNAME  Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release amd64
#define TYPE  binary
#define TYPEbinary  1
#define ARCH  amd64
#define ARCHamd64  1
#define DISKNUM  1
#define DISKNUM1  1
#define TOTALNUM  0
#define TOTALNUM0  1

We can see that it is based on the same version but the architecture is different.

Resources

  1. GNU lzma tar: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/gzip.html
  2. Python lzma compression: https://docs.python.org/3/library/lzma.html

 

 

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