On Tuesday 19 September 2006 00:48, krishnakant Mane wrote:
hello all. I am putting this challenge with reference to my portable book reader project. I want a way to customise my basic ubuntu system and run it from a USB flash card that is put in mobiles or in cameras. or may be a pen drive?
What size ? There are ready distros that run on 64 mb. U could also customize knoppix. Knoppix use compression while storing the image, so can pack more than normal stuff on the usb. There is a knoppix customization howto available and is fairly easy to customize. You could also customize kubuntu, but imo knoppix is better since the heavy lifting is already done..
then some how may be format the USB disk with ext2 and then put it on there.
Making the usb pendrive bootable with grub is a pain. U need a bootable usb or floppy with grub only. Floppy is easier, but floppies being just that will flop a boot or 2 later. With floppy mkfs.<filesystem that you want on the usb> /dev/fd0 copy /boot/grub to the floppy maintaining directory structure. grub-install /dev/fd0. cfdisk /dev/sda1. Delete the dos partition and create a linux partition. mkfs.<filesystem that you want on the usb> /dev/sda1 copy /boot/grub to the pendrive maintaining directory structure. enable usb boot on the mobo setup - usually enable legacy usb support or usb dos. boot from floppy with usb plugged in. At the grub prompt press c u will be dropped into grub shell. At the shell root (fd1). Grub will rspond with xyz file system found on /dev/fd1. Also the led on pendrive will filckr indicating that grub read the pendrive and not the floppy. setup (fd1) grub will respond with the result. Remove floppy and reboot. U should get the grub menu. Now reboot from your hardisk and add stuff to pendrive. Then reboot with pendrive into your pendrive distro.
There is another method using dd but i found that to be unreliable.