Contributors

[RogueSpear]

I've been maintaining my own personal modified UBCD based USB drive for a while now and know my way around this stuff fairly well. I don't know if you're looking for any additional people to officially join in as a contributor to the project or not, but I'm offering if you're accepting. After using Katana for a couple of weeks now, I've decided to make the switch and migrate some of my mods over. So if I can help out, just let me know.

[.ronin]

The more the merrier I say. I would love for people to post any mods for distros or apps that could enhance Katana. I could also use some help and ideas from people who are more familiar with these tools then I. If there are some ideas you have that you don't want to post on the forum, feel free to send me a Message through the forum.

[RogueSpear]

Ok, for my preliminary work... I replaced UBCD 4.1 with UBCD 5.0 RC1. Version 5 of UBCD has two additional directories in root - /antivir and /pmagic which support Avira AntiVir Rescue System and Parted Magic respectively. Also, UBCD v5 uses /boot to hold some files as well.

By default UBCD v5 uses both syslinux and grub4dos. I was having some difficulties getting the syslinux menus to work consistently and I think it's because he uses a lot of COM32 calls where as you use KERNEL calls. Anyway, rather than mess around with it indefinitely, I simply chopped out the syslinux functionality from UBCD and have it using grub4dos exclusively. Which I actually prefer anyway as it makes for easy booting to almost any Ubuntu based .iso file (which I'll outline later). Finally, I also updated the syslinux components of /boot to the latest version that was released late last week.

The easiest way to integrate my changes is to take a standard Katana directory structure and perform the following steps:

1. - Delete the /boot and /ubcd directories
2. - Download the following files and extract them to the / of Katana:

• antivir.7z - MD5: 704649b4215cd37c9ff1ccf781ed27cc
  
• boot.7z - MD5: 2e47b443302380bb73b036c451906d7f
• pmagic.7z - MD5: dc7c7c520a44030a5cfda37d56894f13
• ubcd.7z - MD5: 5db949e483dac82641f126b4318bbc24

I made the following changes to UBCD v5:

• Added - the latest Dell Diagnostics utility to the "System" menu
• Removed - isolinux/syslinux menus
• Updated - Avira AntiVir virus definitions to 20091218
• Updated - Parted Magic from v4.6 beta to v4.7 final

I would say that probably the easiest way to see the modifications I made to /boot would be to use your favorite differencing tool. Now that I am posting this I remember that I did unnecessarily leave a couple of syslinux components in /boot that are not needed by Katana, but were needed by UBCD for syslinux (a couple of .c32 files). I have done a bit of testing with this and it all seems to work just as expected. There are a couple of little utilities that don't seem to work for me, but then again they were not working for me before I integrated with Katana - so no real change there.