slackware on usb flash
 

can i have a portable full install of slackware 14 on a usb flash where i can use it anytime just plug the usb in any computer and get everything working fine as if i'm using my desktop?

i don't intend to use zipslack because i don't want to run it above dos file system instead i need a complete independent slackware.
thank you.

Don't know about Slack, but I've done it with Fedora and Ubuntu.

Yes you can. AlienBob has a howto for creating a bootable USB install.

There is another thread dealing with this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ve-4175453724/

It is sometimes said though that this may not be a good idea because usb flash drives have a limited number of write cycles (or something) and having a regular linux installation on one might wear it out prematurely. You can try using a usb external hard drive though to achieve the same result (although not so portable perhaps).

I tried doing this a few years ago with the extra step of using encryption, in case I lost the drive. Then someone picking it up couldn't get at everything. It took a while to get it working, but I managed it thanks to Eric Hameleer's README_CRYPT.TXT which is bloody excellent I must day.

The one difficulty though going down that route which I never got a really satisfactory workaround for was that since I had to using an initrd, I couldn't get the uuid's to be populated in /dev/disk/by-uuid/ early enough in the boot process. So I had to set up a whole bunch of initrd's, each one with a different root partition: /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc so I could choose the right one to boot at the slackware boot screen (if this makes no sense read the original post in the thread above, their question is very similar to my issue then).

Anyway that was probably just me being a bit thick about it. That thread I've linked to above seems to give pretty much all you need.

Actually NyteOwl (sorry we posted almost at the same time), are you sure about that? He certainly has the README_USB.TXT in the usb-and-pxe-installers subdirectory in the slackware tree, but that is not how to create a full slackware installation on a usb, that is how to create a bootable usb install-disk which can be used to install slackware on another machine.

Maybe I'm wrong and haven't seen the one you are referring to. Do you have a link?

Cheers,

Michael

Sorry to quote myself:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...how-to-919708/
This was actually for an USB hard disk, but I assume that this should work the same on a flash drive. If not, please report.

try Unetbootin software

I am actually building and testing a live Slackware iso using aufs and the linux-live.org scripts. It's not a simple process but it can be done. You can download precompiled kernels with aufs support from the linux-live.org website or you can build your own kernel, which is what I'm doing. My intent is to create essentially a vanilla Slackware 14.0 live cd with the exception of the kernel and related packages/modules (aufs-utils and squashfs).

I believe it can be done with Slack the same way, if u can point me to the documentation you used for Fedora and Ubuntu, or the steps you followed to get the thing done, would be great.
yes you are right this thread gives pretty much what i need.
also Didier Spaier's thread show the exact steps needed to achieve what i asked. as soon as i have time i will try that and will report back if it worked with flash drive.
that would be nice to have a vanilla slack 14.0 live cd, if u dont mind let us know when you create that :)

Thank you all I appreciate all replies.

I'm probably going to be doing something very similar with slackwarearm. Since my goal is to build Porteus Linux (a slackware/linux-live based distro) for ARM (already accomplished for armv5te but I want to test armv6 and armv7), I'll be utilizing Porteus' initrd and a handful of Porteus startup scripts (/etc/rc.d/rc.S, rc.M, etc) but I want the installed packages to be as vanilla slackwarearm as possible so that I have a more foolproof development platform. It shouldn't be a difficult process and I'm willing to share a HOWTO if anyone's interested.

-Ahau