Problems with Feather Linux on a USB stick
 

Hello LQ,

I am trying to get Feather Linux running on a 1GB USB stick. I downloaded the USB stick version of Feather Linux and unpacked it to the USB stick. Secondly I downloaded and unpacked syslinux-3.51 and ranBut when I boot it I get errors that say that all sorts of folders can't be found and then I get a kernel panic.

What did I do wrong?

Hi V!NCENT, This might be the problem.

From: http://featherlinux.berlios.de/usb-instructions.htm

It appears you're using syslinux-3.51 which is the latest. Hope that helps.
Good luck. ;-)

Aha! I read a really old howto in the web that said the same. I just thought that later versions were about weeks older when the article was pubsished so I thought it wouldn't harm to use the much newer 3.51 version. But it's on the feather website aswell. Thanks ;)

That might be the problem which means it might not be the problem. Let us know if that sorted it. You're welcome if it works ;)!
Good luck. ;-)

Nope... still the same problem with syslinux-2.11 :( "FAT error sector 0" and kernel panic. I selected USB-HDD as boot device in the BIOS. I don't have another way of booting it. Could that be the problem? I wanted to try other pc's but they all lack boot from USB support in the bios.

That's actually the preferred selection. Google is turning up nothing for this, "FAT error sector 0". Have you tried zeroing the drive first. This will delete the partition table and render all data useless so be careful that you have the correct device.Where X is your device.After that you can use fdisk or cfdisk to create a new fat partition and file system and try again. I had to do this with a stick that had the u3 software on it to make it useable.
Good luck. ;-)

I literarly have to type every letter except X which should be, in my case, a1? I don't know what bs=512 means but my stick is 1GB, or doesn't that matter?

I'll give you a update on this tommorow :)

If your device is sda then you would use sda not sda1.
Bios from a PC reads the first 512 bytes of a hard disk, so we're effectively wiping the boot sector of the drive. So bs=512 is the block size, and count=1 is to do it once.

The other thing to be certain of, when you unpacked the zip file did you open the directory and copy it's contents to the drive or just copy the entire directory to the drive?
Good luck. ;-)

I copied the files from the ZIP file without copying the root directory, which it was in, to the stick. However there is this map Knoppix along with it and that wasn't unpacked.

So you got it sorted or no?
Good luck. ;-)

Oh yeah, sorry :P I was totally busy wihth school and fixing my scooter yesterday. I am rebooting to Linux _now_ :P

Oh my god I now realise how extremely stupid I have been! I downloaded syslinux under knoppix at another pc, unpacked the archive, cd to the syslinux directory and typed the command. I was so stupid to forget the Syslinux should have been installed first >_< . Appearently Knoppix has Syslinux but the wrong version and that screwed up the image. I realise this now because Ubuntu doesn't have Syslinux and therefore I get command not found.

So I downloaded Syslinux under Ubuntu and read the readme to install it. Problem is... It requires Nasm (a different compiler for god knows why). Nasm, for some reasen, doesn't like to be compiled by GCC. When I was learning a little C I found out that there is no stdio.h in a default Ubuntu install *sigh*. That's probably why Nasm won't compile.

EDIT: I now have to run to the local PC store to buy some cd-r's and tonight my uncles helping me fixing my scooter again. So expect a update tomorrow :)

Update :)

I installed the 'build-essentials' package from the Ubuntu repositories and the ./ configure and make seemed to go well, but the make install command tells me it can't find some of the files to install :(

EDIT: Is there a place on the web where I can dump the commandline output for "./ configure", "make" and "make install" so you can tell me what I do wrong? I am not so good at installing software because I don't know what it all means :(

Have you tried just running syslinux /dev/sda1 from the extracted directory?
Good luck. ;-)