Month: September 2016

09/29/16

Making your own persistent USB bootable Ubuntu Distro: the easy way

I had a recent Ubuntu install with customizations that I wanted to be able to put it on a USB, boot into it on another machine and be able to modify its contents by, installing new packages, editing files, etc…

PinguyBuilder to the rescue

So after a number of false starts. I stumbled upon PinguyBuilder. I followed the excellent instructions at maketecheasier, with the slight modification of checking the PinguyBuilder site for the the latest version. I used the backup option to get all the tweaks on home directory, and my none deb packages in. My Ubuntu was a derivative the standard Xubuntu 16.04 distro.

Moving the ISO to the USB

The generated iso file could then be installed usb-creator-gtk, or if are working on windows, Rufus. At this point I could nicely boot using my USB stick. I could not, however, write anything persistently on the USB. If I create some file, and then reboot, it would be gone!

Making the USB persistent

First I need to create casper-rw file that would be identified by boot-loader as space to write on. I was happy with 2GB, so this what I did by adopting the instructions on StackExchange post:

I created an empty 2GB file

dd if=/dev/zero of=casper-rw bs=1M count=2048

You can changed count to whatever size of persistent storage you want. I then had to format that space into something that Linux would be able to read

mkfs.ext4 -F casper-rw

The next step was to change /boot/grub/grub.cfg file on the USB to have the following menu-entry at the beginning.

menuentry "Xubuntu in persistent mode" {
    set gfxpayload=keep
    linux   /casper/vmlinuz  file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper persistent iso-scan/filename=${iso_path} quiet splash --
    initrd  /casper/initrd.gz
}

Finally, I modified /isolinux/isolinux.cfg to include the extra label

label persistent 
  menu label live - boot the Live System
  kernel /casper/vmlinuz
  append  file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper persistent initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

et voilà!

09/25/16

Julia calling C: A minimal example

This blog is a “Hello World” example of Julia calling C.

We start of by at bit of C code we want to call from Julia. We write the following in calc_mean.c

double mean(double a, double b) {
  return (a+b) / 2;
}

To build the library, we need to create a Makefile

CC=gcc 
 
CFLAGS=-c -Wall -fPIC
 
SOURCES=calc_mean.c 
OBJECTS=$(SOURCES:.c=.o)
 
.c.o:
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@ 
 
lib: $(OBJECTS)
    $(CC) -shared -fPIC -o libmean.so $(OBJECTS)
 
clean:
    rm *.o *.so

The option fPIC and -shared are essential for Julia to be able to resolve the function in our library. Now we are almost ready to build our library. From the bash terminal we invoke:

make lib

This will generate a libmean.so file.

In Julia we call the function in our c library by

x=ccall((:mean,"libmean"),Float64,(Float64,Float64),2.0,5.0)
println(x)
3.5

For this to work,

  • Julia must be running either on the same path where libmean.so resides,
  • the path to libmean.so is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, or
  • the path to the library is pushed to Libdl.DL_LOAD_PATH via

…

push!(Libdl.DL_LOAD_PATH,"path_to_libmean.so")

P.S. Thanks to Christopher Rackauckas for tips on Julia highlighting.