Description Yard is a suite of Perl scripts for creating rescue disks (also called bootdisks) for Linux. A rescue disk is a self-contained Linux kernel and filesystem on a floppy diskette, usually used when you can't (or don't want to) boot off your hard disk. A rescue disk usually contains utilities for diagnosing and manipulating hard disks and filesystems. Yard is distributed under the Gnu Public License or the Perl Artistic License, whichever you prefer.
Features: Requirements: Builds rescue disk from a list of file specifications. File specs allow absolute and relative filenames, symbolic links, file replacements and full shell-style globbing. Automatically determines necessary libraries and loaders. Allows stripping of binaries and libraries during copying. Automatically regenerates ld.so.cache Checks for broken symlinks Checks /etc/{fstab,inittab,termcap} for common errors and inconsistencies. Checks user directories and files mentioned in /etc/passwd Checks command files (eg, rc.local and .login) for missing binaries and command interpreters. Provides information on library usage. Checks NSS and PAM configuration. Automatically performs filesystem compression and copying. Can be used with or without LILO. Can make single or double disk rescue sets. Extensive checking of user choices and execution errors. Perl 5 Linux 2.0 or later
Latest changes (2.2) New with 2.2: Small tweaks to all scripts to eliminate -w warnings Small changes to improve check_root_fs Changes to write_rescue_disk to warn about diskette space before writing kernel
Downloads Source packages Yard 2.2 (source and docs) On-line Yard documentation (HTML). A list of changes for all versions. Debian packages Yard packages for Debian are designed and maintained by Héctor Gárcia Álvarez (hector@huron.scouts-es.org). stable testing unstable New release announcements If you want to be informed of new Yard versions when they are released, there are several ways. If you have an account on Freshmeat, go to the Yard project page on Freshmeat. Under the Project drop-down menu, choose Subscribe. If you're a SourceForge user, login to SourceForge then click here. This will monitor the main Yard package.
Patches ID Contributor Purpose yard-1.17_bootcd+mklinux.patch Soenke Schwardt Allows yard-1.17 to use MKLINUX and to write bootable CDROMs. I have not tested this patch. Note that this is for version 1.17, not 2.2.
Compressed utility disks Stefan Illy (stefan.illy@NOSPAM.ihm.fzk.de) sent me a message explaining how his /etc/rc loads a second compressed diskette to ramdisk using bzip2 and afio. This seems like a good idea and may be a more flexible way to accomodate larger bootdisks (especially with glibc.so growing in size with each new version). Here is his set of files, tarred and compressed. If you're interested in trying this approach, read his message and inspect his choice of files carefully. Note that this approach circumvents Yard's file, library and link checks, so you'll have to enumerate carefully in make_afio_disk the binaries and libraries you need. I hope to integrate this approach into Yard, maybe in version 3.0.
Other Information You may have noticed that glibc.so is huge (>800K) and is difficult to fit on a bootdisk. Here are some instructions for reducing the size of glibc.so, provided by Jeff Sheinberg. These are specific to Debian but probably can be adapted to other distributions. A page on booting Linux from higher density diskettes, from the Linux router project. I'm author of the Linux Bootdisk-HOWTO, which explains how to create bootdisks manually. If you're interested in the details of bootdisk creation, check it out.
Questions or suggestions? Try one of these forums: Bugs Support requests Patches Feature Requests I monitor these forums and I should be responsive to anything posted there (well, as responsive as I am by email). As a last resort you can send email to <fawcett at linuxlots dot com>, but I'd prefer if you posted a message to a forum so other people can see it.