BurnInTest Linux - Creating a live boot environment
These steps refer to creating a live boot environment to run V3 of BurnIntest Linux, for the instructions relating to the older version 2 of BurnInTest please see BurnInTest Linux V2 - Live Boot with Slax. The following steps are based on Kubuntu 10/11.
- Download the Universal USB Installer
- Download the ISO of the Linux distribution you will be using, one that is capable of live booting (there is a list of distributions available on the Universal USB Installer page). To use the GUI version of BurnInTest one that uses KDE as the desktop environment should be chosen.
- Run the Universal USB Installer and select the distribution, ISO of the Linux distribution you are using and the USB drive letter
- Set a persistent file size, this will allow you to save files and settings when the live environment is closed.Ideally this should be at least 500MB, click create to start the process
- Once the process is finished boot from the USB drive and either download BurnInTest from the PassMark website or copy it from your network or another USB drive.
- If you want BurnInTest to automatically launch on startup, edit the config file to use setup the required tests and options. Register your key in BurnInTest and then create a script file in the ~/.kde/Autostart directory (eg called burnintest.sh) that contains;
#!/bin/bash
sudo /home/ubuntu/Documents/burnintest/32bit/bit_gui_x32 -R 1000 &
Make the script executable by using "chmod +x burnintest.sh". Depending on the distribution you should be able to use "emacs" or "nano" to create the script file.
BurnInTest Linux V2 - Live Boot with Slax
Note: Version 3 of BurnInTest Linux will not run in the current version of slax as the required Qt library version is not available, we are investigating alternatives for live booting. For the command line version there is a difference in the way the ncurses library is accessed so there may be a missing library (libtinfo). The current work around is to create a link from libncurses to libtifo;
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libncurses.so.5 libtinfo.so.5
ln -s libtinfo.so.5 libtinfo.so
Slax is a lightweight live CD distribution of Linux that can be used to boot systems from CD/DVD and USB memory sticks. There are two versions of Slax provided, a CD Iso and a USB version which you can download from http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php.
To add the BurnInTest files to the ISO you will need to extract the files from the ISO (or copy from an already burnt CD) and put the BurnInTest files in the "rootcopy" folder. There is an example rootcopy zip here, that you can extract and replace the current rootcopy folder with. It will place BurnIntest command line version in the root folder when Slax is booted and replaces the message of the day with instructions to where BurnInTest was placed.
Before creating the new ISO you can edit the cmdline_config.txt file and configure the tests you want to run. If you have BurnInTest Linux already installed and have entered your key, copy the key.dat file from you current install to the rootcopy/root/bitlinux_cmd_line folder so your registered version will run from the cd.
To create the ISO with the additional files run make_iso.bat (Windows) or make_iso.sh (Linux) with a provided name for the ISO and it will be created ready to burn to a CD. To create a bootable USB memory stick version run make_disk.bat/make_disk.sh.
Log Files
Due to the read only nature of booting from a CD you won't be able to save log files unless you specify a device in the cmdline_config.txt file that has been mounted with write access, such as a USB memory stick or hard drive.
Modules
You can customise your version of Slax by adding extra modules as required. For example it may be a good idea to add a text editor like emacs or vim.
Points to Remember
- If you are booting using a CD then you can't run the CD test as the operating system is running from it. There are some ways around this discussed on the Slax web site or you could boot from a USB memory stick to free up the CD drive for testing.
- NTFS partitions are mounted read only in Linux
- May need to add a fstab file to the rootcopy/etc/ directory when creating an ISO to override default auto detected device settings