[H-GEN] Installing mulinux on a removable USB drive

[Christopher Biggs]

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"Abhay Misra" <s4021760 at student.uq.edu.au> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> Hi,
>   Just wondering if it is possible to install mulinux or for that matter any other tiny version of linux on a removable usb drive. 

Sure.  Provided you have the usb-storage driver and SCSI subsystem
present, (most!) USB-flash drives are accessed like any other SCSI
disks.

You will need a sufficiently recent BIOS that supports booting from
USB storage devices.

As for /installing/ to the device, you would need to find a distribution
that has USB-storage support in its install kernel, and is prepared to
allow you to install to a SCSI drive.   

>From my testing, I can tell you that Redhat 8 doesn't present the USB
storage devices as installable targets, even though it has the
requisite drivers to detect them.

I would guess that Debian might work with the right boot kernel, but
unless you have a pretty big flash disk, you'll probably need a
cut-down "mini-distribution" (which is I assume why you speak of
mulinux, with which I am not familiar).

You could always install to a small partition on a hard drive then
copy over to the USB-flash if the Linux distribution you choose won't
install straight to flash.

All the USB-flash installs I've done have been custom systems
consisting simply of a hand-tuned kernel, GRUB and BusyBox.  A
static-linked busybox is only around 300k, and provides most of the
the /bin and /sbin programs you need to get a running system.   The
"unstable" version of busybox has a hoopy cool configuration menu
system which is modeled on the kernel's "make menuconfig".

The installation is done using an existing Linux box as the host system:

Installing a kernel on the card is best done by:
        # make menuconfig
        # make bzImage modules
        # make install INSTALL_PATH=/mnt/usbflash/boot 
        # make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/mnt/usbflash 

Installing busybox is just:
        # make menuconfig
        # make all
        # make install prefix=/mnt/usbflash 

Getting a bootloader on the card is as simple as:
        # grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/usbflash /dev/sda1
        # vi /mnt/usbflash/boot/grub/menu.lst





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