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? the system will be as follows. 1> a kernel having only those modules required to boot from a USB disk and having sound, display, and other necessary things. the kernel wont have network drivers or even ide drivers. no cd rom drivers. 2. I want to make such an OS on the computer and then port it to usb. 3. I know I wont be able to boot this small system from my hard disk after saying that I will exclude ide drivers. I want a way in which I can create a chroot jail in my existing ubuntu box and try things around a bit. then some how may be format the USB disk with ext2 and then put it on there. or may be make an iso image like what slax does and put it on the pen drive with the help of unionfs. any ideas? Krishnakant.
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.
On 19/09/06, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote: 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.. ok 64 mb nopix on a flash card or usb stick is good enough. but I need to do the following. 1. customise the distro to lonch my custom menu driven application instead of standard bash. 2. put my own kernel instead of the one coming with it. I don't want heavy modules and other softwares that may be coming with nopix. and thirdly, I need to put speach synthesizer like festival. the card is 512 mb so no problem on that. will I be able to do all this with that nopix 64 mb distro? and I came across a bootloader called extlinux may be that will help me some how. Krishnakant.
On Tuesday 19 September 2006 12:32, krishnakant Mane wrote:
ok 64 mb nopix on a flash card or usb stick is good enough. but I need to do the following.
U mis understood. There is no 64 mb knoppix. But u could customize knoppix easily.
- customise the distro to lonch my custom menu driven application
instead of standard bash.
does your app require X or is it CLI?. If X then what wm? suggest FVWM or XFCE.
- put my own kernel instead of the one coming with it.
I don't want heavy modules and other softwares that may be coming with nopix.
U get rid of unwanted modules by simply recompiling the kernel.
and thirdly, I need to put speach synthesizer like festival. the card is 512 mb so no problem on that. will I be able to do all this with that nopix 64 mb distro? and I came across a bootloader called extlinux may be that will help me some how.
Not needed actually. If this is a regular thing u can keep one usb for creating grub bootable usb as follows: plugin bootable usb. Switch on machine when the led on usb starts flickiring plug in new usb (which u have preformatted to the same fs as the first usb and copied /boot/grub). when the grub menu shows up type c. At the grub prompt root (fd1) setup (fd1).
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jtd -
krishnakant Mane