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

[Francisco Ares]

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
>>
>>
>>
>