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

Abhay Misra s4021760 at student.uq.edu.au
Sat Jun 28 07:50:27 EDT 2003


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Thanks for the reply...may be after I give it a try I will trouble u more.
abhay
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Biggs" <listjunkie at pobox.com>
To: <general at lists.humbug.org.au>
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2003 8:15 AM
Subject: Re: [H-GEN] Installing mulinux on a removable USB drive


> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
> "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
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --- Christopher Biggs -- Unix Bigot For Hire -- unixbigot at pobox.com  ---
> The IEEE has monitored this electronic mail message, and asserts that no
> energy was created or destroyed during its construction or transmission.
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