[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] initfs hacking questions

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

Devesh Kothari wrote:
>>
>> Can I distribute hacked initfs? If not, is binary patch OK?
>>
> I am not a legal expert, but please read the EULA (End user license
> agreement). I would be pretty surprise if they would let you do so :)
> 
> Devesh
> 

I am not a legal expert too so reading EULA is probably waste of time 
:-) But anyway I will put instructions how to rebuild it somewhere but 
release also binary diff and wait for Nokia lawyers to ask me to remove 
it. IMO binary diff is not considered as breaking "You may not copy, 
distribute, or make derivative works of the Software". In theory it 
should contain only my pieces of software.

So far I have stripped initfs with one extra uclibc binary to check 
which key is pressed and shell stript to show onscreen menu. It still 
boots fine when no key is pressed :)

As for the uclibc toolchain it was the one without soft floats.

I'm still not sure whether I should store last rootfs setting with 
cal-tool in config partition or better write it to file in initfs 
filesystem (mtd3, jffs2) or somewhere else.

BTW when editing /linuxrc multiple times it happened to me that I still 
had 124 blocks free and could remove files but creating/modifying file 
produced 'no space on device'. Looks like some trouble with jffs2 
garbage collecting. This is strange. I wonder whether reboot may fix 
this? Unfortunately the file I successfully deleted was /linuxrc so I 
had to reflash.

Frantisek