Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

[DeathKitten]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Thank you for all the additional information. The boyfriend is coming over again this weekend, and I suspect he will occupy most of my time not occupied by work, as is his normal mode of operation so I likely won't get further chance to play with this stuff 'til Sunday, since he goes home Saturday night and I am off work Sunday and monday.

I will report back at how well I do working with the information provided here, and I think it's really awesome of you to be putting all this stuff down for others to work with.

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

@Death Kitten -- Sounds like you & your boyfriend have the right idea there. (The flash drive can wait; prolly not so with boyfriend, as this aging hippie also has fond memories of such 1970-ish ... )

=> Very soon (today) I will post an edit of Reply #54 that should be more clear and helpful.

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

OK. Done.

Major edit completed on Reply #54:

Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex KDE 4 ** Major Edit on 12-26-08 **
Live Flash Drive with Persistence - - - Complete & Simplified
(using GRUB as the bootloader)

includes:
-- Using iso files to get Kubuntu and GRUB (without burning a live CD)
-- Working in GUI or CLI
-- Cloning your finished flash drive


=> 10 cases covered:
Getting GRUB files from Kubuntu, from live SGD CD, or from GRUB iso files;
Getting Kubuntu files from live Kubuntu CD or from Kubuntu iso file;
and doing the work in two ways:
GUI (Konqueror, Dolphin)
CLI (Konsole)

Much better treatment of this subject, better laid out, easier to read, and explicit enumeration of all options.

Let me know if anyone finds a typo or, worse, a content error.
I think I tested everything, but then that's how this game works or doesn't work sometime.

[andybleaden]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Now here is the rub.

Tried the live pen drive instructions with persistence and it works on my work laptop but not on this (is my home kubuntu pc. Why would that be?

f12
Starts to boot and then when I select usb pen drive
I get boot then root error and it does not work

Is this a grub issue?

[toad]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Which root error?

[andybleaden]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

just says boot error and then root error

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

@andybleaden, did you use usb-creator?

If so, see my post Reply #64 on usb-creator, towards the end.
If you used a previously used flash drive, and if there's anything at all in the MBR of that flash drive, then problems (like you report) may occur.
If so,
Rx: zero-out that flash drive; repeat usb-creator install.
(if you do zero-out the flash drive, please be very careful with that dd command--an incorrect device naming on your part, /dev/sdxn, could wipe out the wrong drive in your system.)
You can also just zero-out the MBR, but it only take a short while to clean up the whole thing--it's your call.

[toad]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

No, I think he

Tried the live pen drive instructions

and I'm gobsmacked that he managed at all! Well done, Andy. Can't help though, 'cos pendrive has let me down without fail

However, it does seem odd and could have something to do with drive assignment. Is there really nothing more it spurts out in way of error messages? Have you mananged to boot that box off other usb devices before?

[andybleaden]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Well thanks to both of you for getting back to me.

I have actually had a few bashes at this so let me clarify what I have tried and the success/experience so far.

First of all I tried the usb-creator programme the hard way as I am on 8.04 and at the time there was an 8.10 version only. But being rather interested in the concept I ran it on a live cd and downloaded usb-creator from the repos in 8.10* (a note here. I can only run 8.10 on a live cd within safe graphics mode as I have graphics card issues- see my other posts ).
So ( and I do not know how) on the live cd after a few attempts I managed to download usb creator and ran it successfully and put 8:10 on a pen drive (2gb) with about 700 mb of persistence to play about with.

I could not then use it at home as I got the earlier described error which was a black screen with the following exact message at top of screen:
boot error..

then it changed to:

root error..

and nothing happened. So stuck the pen drive in my pocket to try at work on my (Windows) laptop

Tried it on my laptop..here I need to explain I am fairly new to messing around with boot screens, and the whole f12 side of things..but it worked.

Sat at work on a laptop with live 8:10 system ( a few interested glances meant I had to be careful) For many reasons our system is locked tight so I can not mess with my system here ( fair enough) and cannot install within windows the wubi programme.

However. I was in 8:10 on a laptop. I could use everything except access the internet even via proxy which was a pain as I thought I could get around it. However for a few hours I could experiment and check my work email via outlook web access which as an internal (approved) site worked as did the internal intranet thing. However I could not install anything new on my pen drive as I could not download it

It was the first time I had spent more than 10 mins on 8.10 so had a chance to experiment. I took the laptop home and could connect to my wireless easily enough and could add stuff and the pen drive had remembered passwords etc since the morning so it was cool and I was pleased.

However for me it was not too much use at this point as it did not work at work because of security issues and it was a different system to what I had at home as I was on 8.04.




Then I found that they had also created a usb-creator for 8.04 so went about a lot easier and recreated a new pen drive image …tried at home on home pc..same issue
With error message boot and root error as before. Here I made a mistake as I never tried this at work thinking that the image was perhaps faulty. I had also ordered a new pen drive thinking I could eventually have my whole kde home folder and other stuff on one pen drive ( the 16gig one I mentioned before)

I have retried today the new pen drive and it works on work laptop no probs…not that slow either ( still bleedin faster to boot than works windoze!).

SO I know the boot/root error is connected with either

A) using my pen drive on home pc as a live thing so something to do with what you suggest re boot mbr …er stuff ( ok I do not understand) so I can play about wiping the mbr info as described

B maybe I need a grub bootloader method?

Hope that fills in gaps in what I managed to get done

[toad]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Ah, not the instructions from pendrivelinux then - my mistake.

No this is it post, I'm afraid But I'd take a look at your /boot/grub/device.map

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

My manual how-to, Reply #54, is GRUB-based, so that's a GRUB option.
BUT ...
usb-creator should also work (which is what you are trying, I believe, right?).
And for usb-creator, after what I went through with it, I'd definitely only use it on a cleaned flash drive, OR on a flash drive that has been partitioned the old way, without MBR, some FAT32 thing way. Most new flash drives come that way--ready to go with a FAT32 format and no MBR (the way we think of it). It just boots off the first FAT32 sector using Syslinux or some such. Cleaning flash drive: Explained in Reply #64 on zero-out the flash drive (be very careful to get the correct device /dev/sdxy) for it in the dd statement! It's much easier using dd to do that than it is to work through my manual method.

Quote from Reply #64:
=>>>Zero-out ONLY the MBR:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1
and then run usb-creator, and it will work.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> That assumes your flash drive is popping up in Kubuntu as sdc.
Then, let usb-creator do all the rest (i.e., do NOT use gparted to partition/format).

[andybleaden]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Cleaning flash drive: It's much easier using dd to do that than it is to work through my manual method. Will do

That assumes your flash drive is popping up in Kubuntu as sdc. Yes it comes up as sdc1 or the more recent larger one is sdd1

and yes I was using usb-creator

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

So, if it comes up as, say sdc (or sdd), then:

In Kubuntu, plug it in and let it be recognized by Kubuntu.
Open Konsole.
Type
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1

After it finishes (quickly) it will report to you.
Then the MBR should be clean of any artifacts.
Then run usb-creator and let it format or whatever it prompts.

[MoonRise]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Are we talking about the same USB Cretor as here http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...2193#msg162193? If so, I haven't had issues with my Mem Stick since using this tool. I did however reformat it to FAT32 before using the tool.

[dibl]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Two things I've been meaning to do lately:

(a) Try to make a bootable flash drive using Mike's #54 method, and

(b) Give Elive another look -- it's been almost two years since I last played with this unique-looking distribution of Debian Linux.

So, this morning I combined my goals, and did 'em both together. Last night I had downloaded the Development version ISO, 1.9.21, from here:

http://www.elivecd.org/Download/Development

It is only available as a 32-bit architecture - no problem -- that's probably what one should use on a USB stick to be booted on multiple unknown computers in the future.

So, I have two 8G USB sticks, a PNY and a SanDisk. I realize this project would be more sensibly done on a 2G or 4G stick -- oh well. I decided on the SanDisk Cruzer, dd'd it, then used GParted to make a 796M first partition and the rest of it for the casper-rw partition, and set the boot flag on the first partition. Both are formatted ext2, since USB media will only have their life expectancy shortened by all the journaling that goes on in ext3. Looking at the kernel boot line in the instruction, I realized I needed to know exactly the size of the larger partition to be used for "persistence", so I opened Dolphin to check. Boo -- Dolphin says "20,480K" -- that's not an exact number of bytes! So, I multiplied 20,480 * 1024, got 20,971,520, crossed my fingers and used that figure in the appropriate kernel boot line, in the menu.lst.

I obviously amended the recommended menu.lst file to reflect the OS being booted, dropped a couple of stanzas that aren't relevant to me (I do not intend to install this OS), etc., but basically I followed Mike's instruction as stated.

Upon finishing the procedure, I shutdown and rebooted with the SanDisk Cruzer in the USB connector.

WOW!

Wow! -- Elive is still one crazy desktop!

Wow! -- Mike's instruction worked perfectly, first time -- I'm posting this from Iceweasel in Elive, running on my booted USB stick. The only further step that I needed to do was to change the permission on the casper-rw "device", (which appears on my 5-disk system as sdf2), so I can (as a user) make folders and save things there. The default user in the Elive Live CD is "eliveuser", so, at the elive root prompt, I did:

~#chown eliveuser /mnt/sdf2

Very nice job Mike -- (a) it's very understandable, and (b) it works great! Thanks for posting it.