after about 6 months with gentoo, ive decided to try some other distros, just to see what the rest of the linux world has been up to, however i dont have enough space on my laptop hdd and my previous server is quite dead what i want to know, is if anyone knows of a way that you can get any distro installed on a portable usb hard drive, my bios is capable of booting to such a device and im hoping that something like chroot would allow me to enter setup program for distros such as fedora or slackware that i could hopefully then install install to my usb hdd despite lacking usb support on the cds themselves, any hints or pointers would be greatly appreciated

Slackware supports many USB devices right out of the box... Give it a try.


www.slackware.com has much useful information as well.

are you sure that the install cd supports installing to a usb hard drive? is this a recent addition as I did not think it was possible in 8.1, I cant find any actual information on installing to a usb drive from slackware but i will download the disk tonight and if it doesnt work ill start playing with chroot on my own and just hope that it works for me thankfully, slackware tells you a lot about the way its installer works right on the webpage, i doubt fedora will be so simple

Hey..... Try installing LFS.... You'll have fun with it. That would work PERFECTLY for your setup. I think you might appreciate using LFS too seeing as how it is a distro that YOU built from the ground up. I love LFS. Think I'm going to MAKE my own release cause I'm tired of waiting on 5.1....

I checked the kernel config that was used for the 9.1 distro.
It has support for all sorts of USB chingaderas built in, but I'm not *absolutely* sure it's supported.

well, its still downloading off of a torrent, and going rather slow at that however even if slackware has this support im really hoping to find a solution with which i can install ANY distro, maybe trial and error will do me best here

jong357, have you tried gentoo? I've thought of using LFS and putting portage on it until i reconsidered and decided that since gentoo is nearly the same thing with portage already installed whats the point? if you havent tried gentoo give it a whirl, not quite as much learning as LFS requires, but more than a lot of people ever get and its just as customisable plus the same neat thing about not having to boot into a install cd applies for gentoo too, you can chroot into a decompressed tarball on a partition and build it from there, anyways if you havent tried it i reccomend it youll never find a system thats easier to take care of or more up to date

Yea, I have tried Gentoo. I liked it alot. Atleast, I liked building it. Started with a stage one... I had really bad multitasking probs with it tho.... Couldn't do 2 or 3 things at once.... It would lock up and start laging big time.... I need to try using some flags next time around I guess.... Not sure what that was all about.... I haven't forsaken it. Just put it on the back burner. I might be interested in getting myself a usb hard drive soon... 40 gigs will only take you so far on a laptop... I'll have to look into this problem your having... Slackware is top notch..... I really enjoy using it. Sounds cheezy but it's true. Don't know what it is about slack... I was multi-booting 7 distro's for over a year and wiped every thing except Slack, FreeBSD and LFS just a few days ago..... I'm down to 3 and Slack has always had the lead for favorites....

I hope slack works for you. I want to say that it won't. Atleast not using the default bare.i kernel..... They don't name it "bare" for nothing..... Once you burn the disk, open it up and start reading the "readme" files for each kernel in the kernel directory..... There has to be atleast one kernel that will have usb storage enabled in the kernel. There are like 20 of them that you can use for the install..... Come to think of it.... You can make your own kernel boot disk to use for slack.... Yea.... Hmmm... You can use whatever kernel you wish for a slack installl, I believe...... If there isn't one already on the disk, you can make your own and put it on a floppy... Sounds like some work but it can be done.....

How big is your hard drive anyway? If you were to trust me and free up some room for slack.... You wouldn't regret it.... Never have I used a more stable OS.... Not the slighest prob in over a year with anything... we'll see. It just raidiates "stability" from the first second you hit the desktop... Shit you not. I'll look into this usb storage thing tomorrow when my BAL has gone down a bit.....

Jon

sigh....

just an update, I dont seem to be able to get slackware to install on a usb hdd from the install disk, and I also dont see how to chroot into it. I would hope that I could load my own kernel that would work if I had a floppy drive, but unfortunately this is a Dell laptop and no such device exists and even if I had one, it would be USB, even more non-luck if anyone has any ideas I'd be glad to hear them