Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)

[Nilesh Govindrajan]

On 28-Mar-2014 8:55 pm, "Francisco Ares" <frares@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> Also, as for a bootable flash drive, if you use logical volumes for mount
partitions, it works like a charm. If not, depending on the other physical
drives, during boot, drive letters may change (I believe during the
initramfs part of the boot).
>
> It was basically like this:
>
> - install a bare bones Gentoo system on a hard drive in the usual way,
and make it do whatever you'll want when it goes to the pen drive.
> - build the kernel with several modules built in, in special usb storage
(of course) and all related to LVM (Gentoo Wiki is great!), and also, as I
use "genkernel", there is a command line argument "--lvm"
> - create a few partitions on the pen drive (on mine there are two, but
one is enough), create logical volumes for /boot and / - or /root - at
least)
> - using grub2, in the file /etc/default/grub, the kernel command line
should include "dolvm scandelay=10 rootdelay=10" (the numerical values are
far from optimized).
> - mount the root partition in another directory (so that other mounts
would not appear), copy it to yet another directory, strip it down (since I
use squashfs and it is read-only, there is no reason to have /usr/src ,
/usr/include , /usr/portage and many others), then copy to the pen drive
root partition; special care should be taken with /etc/fstab .
> - umount your current /boot partition, mount the pen drive boot partition
in /boot (just to make things look familiar), mount the hard drive boot
partition elsewhere, copy its contents to the pen drive boot partition, and
issue a grub-install to the pen drive disk (/dev/sdb, for instance) and
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
>
> That's very incomplete, since, for instance and as already mentioned, I
use a squashfs root partition, so I had to figure out some ways, using
unionfs, to have a writable partition mounted on top of the read only one
for /var and for /etc (at least).
>
>
> 2014-03-28 12:00 GMT-03:00 Francisco Ares <frares@×××××.com>:
>
>> To auto log-in, I use a feature of "agetty":
>>
>> On /etc/inittab:
>>
>> # TERMINALS
>> # c1:12345:respawn:/usr/bin/fbi -a -noverbose --nocomments
/etc/splash/natural_altec/images/silent-1024x768.jpg
>> c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty --noclear 38400 tty1 linux
>> c2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux
>> c3:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux
>> c4:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux
>> c5:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux
>> c6:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -a AutoLogInUserName 38400 tty6 linux
>>
>> And for auto run, after auto log-in accomplished, I use ".bash_profile"
on the auto logged-in user's home directory.
>>
>> Hope this helps
>> Francisco
>>
>>
>> 2014-03-28 11:15 GMT-03:00 Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk>:
>>
>>> On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote:
>>> > On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +0000, Peter Humphrey wrote:
>>> > > I've installed that old favourite SysRescCD on a pen drive,
following a
>>> > > method I found on the Web to include a persistent file-system with
all
>>> > > the extras I wanted in, e.g., /usr/local/bin.
>>> > >
>>> > > It works well, except that I haven't found yet where to put all my
>>> > > aliases to have them sourced at (auto) log-in.
>>> >
>>> > There is a file that is executed by default at login, I think it
>>> > is .autorun. I remember having to add an option to ignore it on the
>>> > LXFDVDs because we use .autorun on those to launch a browser.
>>>
>>> I had a poke around and didn't get anywhere with .autorun, but
eventually I
>>> found that SysRescCD uses zsh, not bash. It hadn't occurred to me until
then
>>> to consider the shell. So that's why the auto-login function wasn't
behaving
>>> the way I expected.
>>>
>>> Thanks again Neil.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Regards
>>> Peter
>>>
>>>
>>
>

You don't really need to use LVM, you just assign filesystem labels and use
root=LABEL=...

Or use UUID