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It all depends how you build your penguin on your USB HD.
If it lacks driver for something at given hardware, your penguin will choke. In other words, your penguin has to have abilities to live at any given place, it be not only antarctica, zoo and Galapagos, but anywhere. Penguins on Live CD are trained in this way.
You just turn on kernel options as necessary and include all drivers, and avoid any vender specific settings and set CPU as 386. (at cost of disk space and speed) If you want to use some other CPU such as PowerPC, SPARK, 68K you need additional trick, so that your penguin can survive outside of the earth.
It all depends how you build your penguin on your USB HD.
If it lacks driver for something at given hardware, your penguin will choke. In other words, your penguin has to have abilities to live at any given place, it be not only antarctica, zoo and Galapagos, but anywhere. Penguins on Live CD are trained in this way.
You just turn on kernel options as necessary and include all drivers, and avoid any vender specific settings and set CPU as 386. (at cost of disk space and speed) If you want to use some other CPU such as PowerPC, SPARK, 68K you need additional trick, so that your penguin can survive outside of the earth.
Happy Penguins!
The story sounds good, and seems logic.
Is there some kind of tutorial available on how to do this?
Your ability to boot from a USB drive will depend on whether or not the PC's BIOS support booting from USB. If so, then connecting the USB drive will work as long as the boot sequence has the USB device listed at the top, otherwise, if the BIOS does not support booting from USB, you are out of luck.
It's more of a BIOS support issue way than it is a driver issue, unfortunately.
Having never used a USB hard drive your answer confuses me a little. Maybe just my ignorance showing.
If a normal hard drive is moved to a different computer all types of issues can come up with the OS installed on that drive. If Plutonic has ubuntu configured for a particular machine (xorg etc) are issues not possible as kaz2100 suggested? Is the USB setup not the same as a regular hard drive install in this way?
Edit/ Sorry J.W., on rereading it is obvious you were adding info rather than questioning the original response. I must learn not to post past my bedtime.
Last edited by muddywaters; 12-13-2006 at 12:26 PM.
Sorry for any confusion -- just to clarify, Yes, I was only intending to call some attention to the fact that not all PC's have a BIOS that can support booting from a USB device. Generally speaking, I'd guesstimate that anything built within the last 2 years (give or take) probably will support it, but it gets a lot more hit-or-miss with equipment that's 3 or more years old. Fortunately, it's really easy to determine whether or not a given machine does support booting from USB -- just take a look at the boot sequence options in BIOS. If it's not listed, the answer is No.
Another way is you could get an SATA/USB/IEEE-1394 enclosure. If the computer has SATA or eSATA connectors, you can use that. Both USB and IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire or i.Link) storage devices can still be bootable with out the BIOS supporting this option by using a 60 mm CD/DVD or an IDE card reader.
An adventurous way is modifying the BIOS code to boot up from an external source.
I suggest study the scripts that comes with your favorite LIVE Linux distributions. Then write your own scripts that will be run on every boot.
But what I mean is just the moving part from one system to another.
I know that the systems I will be working on will all have USB-boot support. Only issue is the hardware differences.
When U put a live-cd in a computer it scans everything and writes standard settings for that. Is it possible to make my Distro live but still on my harddrive accepting all changes to non-hardware related settings?
The best way is to just make a generic kernel that'll boot anything within the given architecture. I'm going to assume that you want a portable Linux system for testing, or simply because it's better to use Linux for the kinds of tasks you'll be performing. Either way, instead of going through all the hassle associated with studying Live CDs and trying to mimic their scripts and such, and creating far more work than it's worth; just make a generic kernel. If push comes to shove you can always recompile for a specific system.
Re-read my post again. This time read it thoroughly.
BTW, spell all words. Do not post like you were using IM.
I did read your post, and about studying scripts.. I'm quite new to Linux so even if I want to study some scripts that live-cd's are using I would not know where to start.
I was just wondering there must be someone else who probably already did soemthing like this with his/her linux. That there might be some walkthrough available.
If not I would like to know where to start studying, what files should I look into on a live-distro?
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