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Ubuntu testing maverick netbook daily builds

July 7, 2010, 06:32 -

Privately I am running an Acer Aspire One D150 (AAO). Although it has Windows XP installed, I did not hesitate to break the partitions and installed first Ubuntu Netbook edition (8.04) and actually updated up to 9.04.

I am always impressed about the great tools available freely for all kinds of usage.

Now Maverick (10.10) Netbook edition will come and I like to test it from time to time but without burning CDs, creating bootable USB sticks. So I stumbled about testdrive. Although this a great tool, it was not able to run the daily build iso inside virtualbox on the AAO.

I remembered that grub should be able to mount iso and start the AAO from that iso. Now I able to test maverick daily builds without touching my well running ubuntu. I can do updates to the iso using zsync and can start, run and test maverick with acceptable performance.

Prerequisite

I copied the iso to /fromiso and extracted vmlinuz and initrd.lz from the iso and placed these two files in /fromiso. To run a daily update I created a script to do it automatically:

#!/bin/sh
cd /fromiso
zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook/daily-live/current/maverick-netbook-i386.iso.zsync
# extract boot files
echo "#### mounting iso"
sudo mount -o loop /fromiso/maverick-netbook-i386.iso /mnt/iso
ls -l /fromiso
echo "#### copy initrd.lz"
cp /mnt/iso/casper/initrd.lz /fromiso/initrd.lz
echo "#### copy vmlinuz"
cp /mnt/iso/casper/vmlinuz /fromiso/vmlinuz
ls -l /fromiso
echo "#### unmounting iso"
sudo umount /mnt/iso
echo "#### finished"

GRUB

I added one menu entry in my /boot/grub/menu.lst:

# Test iso
title       Maverick Daily i386 (from ISO)
kernel (hd0,5)/fromiso/vmlinuz iso-scan/filename=/fromiso/maverick-netbook-i386.iso boot=casper quiet splash
initrd (hd0,5)/fromiso/initrd.lz

Now, when I boot the netbook, I can select this entry from grub menu and start a maverick daily build.

I am always impressed what is possible with free tools in Ubuntu and all the great linux community.

THANKS to all community developers

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