I thought I'd revisit this project to put my new skill set to good use.
I'm hoping to make some dramatic improvements, starting with Raincoat.
Lately I've been experimenting with;
"007 TSOP Flash Kit v1.0 alpha 6" by modrobert@eurasia.nu
A TSOP flash kit based on Linux and raincoat 0.5 by andy@warmcat.com.
http://www.eurasia.nu/modules.php?name= ... le&sid=160
And I find myself in a similiar position as "Professor Jonny":
As mentioned previously in "NeMesiS TSOP Flasher & Auto Installer 3.0" Post
http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... =13&t=3862
I've also linked the linuxrc to an external script and implemented bios size verification.professor_jonny wrote: I made custom initrd there is a post on here somewhere, it might of been on the old forum. It has the ability to load a Linux bash script from outside the initial ramdisk stored on the xbox hdd. The cleaver thing you could copy on another script and customize a flash tool that could be used as an auto installer and supported windbond chips. It did bios file size verification on startup and did selection using a keyboard or controller for input as I patched in drivers for the controller to map buttons to keys on the keyboard. Only problem is that I did not or could not figure out how to compile busy box and patch it in the initrd I messed with different built tools and finally gave up. The raincoat flasher disk busybox build was rather stripped down did not have all the Linux commands to do file verification checks so I remed the lines hoping someone would follow on from my attempts.
I used it several times to do windbond flashing booting Linux and loading bios images off hdd. the initrd you have to have the image under 4 or 8 mb I think because of available ram and I could not fit all the bios images and scripting to do a complete flash tool and I wanted to make it simple and small.
here is the link: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... 942#p13942
it brought up a little text menu and psarsed on the selection to raincoat flasher. I used file to disk on the pc to mount the initrd as a disk then ran a emulator on windows of a Ubuntu install. I had to do it this way for netbsd socket emulation as I had a winmodem and it did not work under Linux.
Instead of having to select the bios size manually, my script will flash the appropriate bios size
accordling to the detected flash type, which are read from raincoat.cfg file (151 flashtypes).
"modrobert" compiled Raincoat0.5+ for me which increased read flashtypes from 31 to 1024.
Having a limited initrd image size of 4mb, it made it difficult to import additional binaries.
However I was able to symlink binaries stored on xbox hd to the initrd image.
I acquired binaries like unrar, awk and stat from Resctoox...
I was also able to adapt busybox-1.00 from Resctoox, however it had been compiled
in a way that it would not load the linuxrc script but a load a terminal screen awaiting input.
Like so: "Gentoox:> _ "
My objective is compile a completely automated TSOP flasher, requiring little to no input.
I would like to update busybox and other functional binaries to extend the TSOP Flashers abilities.
But it would be nice to have all the improvements contained on a single image...
I would firstly need an alternative loader to work from such as Gentoox (Resctoox) Loader or XblastOS.
Being unable to locate a download for XblastOS in the usuall places, I then moved onto Resctoox.
I noticed its running a slightly updated kernel (2.4.32) which supports a 26mb initrd image (approx 8mb after gzip)
But is there a way to make Gentoox Loader to boot my initrd image and in turn run my linuxrc script without any input?