2.5 Customization

The following instructions are mainly useful for installing ttylinux by hand, but the configuration files and options described here are also present in a ttylinux system installed from the bootable CD-ROM.

Before you go about installing ttylinux, you may want to change a few settings inside the image file to fit your own system. This is done by uncompressing and mounting the image and then making the appropriate changes. If the image is in the current working directory, do the following as the root user:

  gunzip rootfs.gz
  mkdir mnt
  mount -o loop rootfs mnt

Now the ttylinux filesystem is mounted on the directory mnt. Take a look at it if you wish. If you want to install ttylinux to a hard disk by hand, you can now create an installation archive for that purpose as follows:

  cd mnt
  tar cvzf ../ttylinux-hd.tar.gz .
  cd ..

After this, you have a file called ttylinux-hd.tar.gz that can be unpacked onto any filesystem you like.

The things you will probably want to customize on ttylinux are the keyboard map and timezone in use and the Internet provider settings. You can copy over the keyboard and timezone setting from your working system as follows:

  mnt/bin/dumpkmap > mnt/etc/i18n/keymap.dat
  cat /etc/localtime > mnt/etc/localtime

To set up the dial information for an Internet provider, you need to know the following:

the device your modem is connected to, i.e. /dev/ttyS1
the init string for your modem, i.e. ATZ
the speed your modem can talk to the computer, i.e. 115200
the phone number of your ISP, i.e. 1-800-LETMEIN
your user name at the ISP, i.e. joeuser
your password at the ISP, i.e. joepass

The above is for dialup using a modem. If you want to use ISDN dialup, you need to know the following:

the phone number of your ISP, i.e. 1-800-12345678
your user name at the ISP, i.e. joeuser
your password at the ISP, i.e. joepass
the phone number you want to use for dialing out
whether you want to use automatic or manual dialing

Edit the file mnt/etc/isp.conf and change the settings there to your liking. Note that ttylinux only knows about providers that launch a PPP session immediately after dialup (which should be true for almost all providers these days), so if some special procedure is needed to log you in, your Internet connection will not work with ttylinux. The ttylinux approach will work with almost all providers in Germany, but I don't know about other countries.

For ttylinux to use ISDN, you need to have USE_ISDN=yes in /etc/isp.conf, the default is not to use ISDN. Obviously, you also need a kernel with ISDN support and hardware support for your ISDN hardware. If you need kernel modules to run your ISDN hardware, you will also need to add those and a suitable /etc/modules.conf to the ttylinux filesystem.

Once you are finished making changes, unmount the filesystem and run gzip to compress it again:

  umount mnt
  gzip -9 rootfs

You are now ready for the real installation.

Note that this section has only covered the minimum customization needed to run ttylinux. There is more to tune, have a look at the system guide (section 3) below for information. If you aim at the approach of running ttylinux from ramdisk, you must configure everything for your needs before you continue the installation, so it may be a wise idea to read the system guide section before you countinue. If you install to a hard disk, you can always configure things later.