Linux on portable hard drive
 

Let's say I install linux on a portable drive using my laptop. Would it only be configured, hardware wise, for that laptop. Or will it work on any system i plug it into and boot to it?

It depends on how you install it.

Elaborate please.

There's a number of variables here.

First, if it's a liveCD iso (set up with whatever piece of software that allows you to boot iso's, I forget what it's called...) or a "liveUSB" (I have one of these with puppy on it... very useful.) it'll act just like a liveCD and automatically configure for the hardware it's on at boot time.

If you're talking about an actual install, then it can get a little tricky. As far as device drivers and various kernel modules, I'm not sure how some of the automagical distros decide which modules to load, if it's set and has to be changed manually or if they're detected on each boot, but my gut feeling is they're probably not automagically detected EACH boot, but on the first one and then set in files. Someone should probably chime in on that.

Now for X11's configuration (like if you were to switch peripherals- pointers (mice) keyboards, monitors, ETC.) is automatically detected by default on (all?) major distros now (even the newest version of slackware has this ability! Luckily if you have an xorg.conf it overrides the automagic part though :-) Good old static files!).

Anyway, what it all boils down to here is give it a go on multiple computers and see what happens.

P.S. can you report back with success/failure/what happened and your distro? I'm curious what happens. I'll follow this thread.

P.P.S. I would back it up somehow just in case something weird happens :-)

Yeah I'm doing an actual install on the portable drive. I will report back after I try it on several different computers.

I installed Linux Mint 9 onto an external usb hard drive attached to my desktop computer, installed and configured my preferred applications, and then used remastersys to create a live cd of my installation.

When I booted the cd in a laptop computer with completely different hardware the live cd recognised the new hardware and configured itself accordingly, and everything worked perfectly.

Note that the remastersys live cd does not include proprietary drivers, such as for graphics cards.

That's what I was thinking, the graphic drivers could be a problem I assume.

Well, everything worked with the default drivers. The way I did it was to disable the proprietary nvidia drivers in my usb hard drive installation and configure the graphics setup the way I wanted with the default drivers. Then I made a remastersys live cd, and when I booted the live cd the default drivers did their job perfectly.

This was despite the fact that the hardware on the laptop was completely different - for example, on my desktop computer I have twin monitors configured as a single large desktop, with the taskbar on the left monitor, and I left it this way when I made the remastersys live cd. When I booted the live cd on the single-screen laptop, the system automatically reconfigured itself to use a single-monitor display setup.

See my reply in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...xt-hdd-824121/