Run GNU/Linux from a USB pen drive (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge reviews the Slax distribution, which can be installed on a USB pen drive. "Slax is a powerful and complete bootable distro based on Slackware, equipped with kernel 2.6, ALSA sound drivers, Wi-Fi card support, X11-6.8.2 with support for many GFX cards and wheel mice, and KDE 3.4. Slax uses the Unification File System (also known as unionfs), which enables you to write whatever you want into the pen drive. Bundled software includes KDE, the KOffice office suite, GAIM for chat, the Thunderbird email client, and the Firefox Web browser."

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Run GNU/Linux from a USB pen drive (NewsForge)

Posted Jul 21, 2005 4:49 UTC (Thu) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (1 responses)

For those interested, the article doesn't mention that the most recent SYSLINUX (post-3.0) doesn't require FAT16 anymore, and can be used with FAT32 partitions.

Also, you might want to check out mbr to use as your MBR boot loader, at least until GRUB works well on these devices. I used information found at http://www.marlow.dk/usbkeys as the basis for a page for my own full-blown KNOPPIX and FreeDOS sticks at https://www.ilikelinux.com/howto/BootUSBStick (yeah, self-signed SSL cert, gotta accept it to view, sorry). The way shown on both of these pages allows for use of a real partition map on the drive, rather than installing the filesystem to the raw device directly.

Run GNU/Linux from a USB pen drive (NewsForge)

Posted Jul 21, 2005 9:24 UTC (Thu) by ATN (guest, #20069) [Link]

Another solution would be to use Gujin v1.2 ( http://gujin.org )
to format the USB Key. You can then have exactly the same files
for either a CDROM or a USB Key, just a different filesystem
(ISO9660 for the CDROM/DVD and FAT for the USB key).
You can also have "/boot/memtest.bdi" to run a floppyimage like
the usual memtest one to test your memory, since version 1.2.

As simple as, once install-1.2.tar.gz downloaded from sourceforge
and extrated in a directory, for USB_FDD:
./instboot boot.bin /dev/sda --disk=BIOS:0x00 --geometry=/dev/sda
Or to create a partition for USB_HDD:
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=64 # force blank head of disk
./instboot boot.bin /dev/sda --disk=BIOS:0x80 --geometry=/dev/sda \
--mbr-device=/dev/sda --partition_index=1
A lot more info in file install.txt in this directory.