Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Friday 28 Mar 2014 21:08:02 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 28 Mar 2014 14:15:56 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: 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. I don't think it's down to the shell, sysresccd includes bash too AFAIR. Yes, bash is present, but root (superuser) has /bin/zsh as its shell in /etc/passwd, so bash scripts aren't run on login. It's more likely due to me giving your duff information, the file is autorun not .autorun. I did manage to drop the dot :-) ---8 Aha, just found the proper documentation for it http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Run_your_own_scripts_with_autorun That looks interesting - thanks. First though I think I'll pursue getting my aliases, and unaliases, into zsh startup. Or is it simple to change root's login shell? It seems unlikely that simply editing /etc/passwd would do it. -- Regards Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Sat, 29 Mar 2014 10:07:22 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: I don't think it's down to the shell, sysresccd includes bash too AFAIR. Yes, bash is present, but root (superuser) has /bin/zsh as its shell in /etc/passwd, so bash scripts aren't run on login. Ah yes, I see what you mean. Aha, just found the proper documentation for it http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Run_your_own_scripts_with_autorun That looks interesting - thanks. First though I think I'll pursue getting my aliases, and unaliases, into zsh startup. Or is it simple to change root's login shell? It seems unlikely that simply editing /etc/passwd would do it. It is that simple. One of the first things I do on a new install is sed -i s/bash/zsh/ /etc/passwd Dropping the aliases into ~/.zshrc is the easy option, that way to get your aliases and a superior shell. -- Neil Bothwick He's dead, Jim. You get his phaser, I'll grab his wallet. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Saturday 29 Mar 2014 16:41:10 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 29 Mar 2014 10:07:22 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: I don't think it's down to the shell, sysresccd includes bash too AFAIR. Yes, bash is present, but root (superuser) has /bin/zsh as its shell in /etc/passwd, so bash scripts aren't run on login. Ah yes, I see what you mean. Aha, just found the proper documentation for it http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Run_your_own_scripts_with_a utorun That looks interesting - thanks. First though I think I'll pursue getting my aliases, and unaliases, into zsh startup. Or is it simple to change root's login shell? It seems unlikely that simply editing /etc/passwd would do it. It is that simple. One of the first things I do on a new install is sed -i s/bash/zsh/ /etc/passwd I'll bear it in mind (until I forget - about 10 minutes, I expect). Dropping the aliases into ~/.zshrc is the easy option, that way to get your aliases and a superior shell. That's what I've done so far. I haven't noticed any difficulty running zsh without knowing it, so maybe I'll just leave it at that. Ta muchly. -- Regards Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
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 pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk: On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 28-Mar-2014 8:55 pm, Francisco Ares fra...@gmail.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 fra...@gmail.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 pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk: On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
Everyday learning something that's why I like Linux and, in special, Gentoo. Thanks Francisco 2014-03-28 12:26 GMT-03:00 Nilesh Govindrajan m...@nileshgr.com: On 28-Mar-2014 8:55 pm, Francisco Ares fra...@gmail.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 fra...@gmail.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 pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk: On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
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 fra...@gmail.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 pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk: On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Fri, 28 Mar 2014 14:15:56 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: 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. I don't think it's down to the shell, sysresccd includes bash too AFAIR. It's more likely due to me giving your duff information, the file is autorun not .autorun. If you press the help keys at the boot menu, you will eventually find an explanation of how it works, around F5 I think. Aha, just found the proper documentation for it http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_Run_your_own_scripts_with_autorun -- Neil Bothwick Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 19:37:35 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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. Ah! That sounds likely. I'll have another look. Thanks again, Neil. -- Regards Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 3/21/2014 9:53 PM, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: Hi, Since I don't have a laptop, I'm thinking of installing Gentoo on my USB 3 pen drive. I'll use binpkgs from my desktop so that pen drive lives long. Has anybody tried Samsung's F2FS? I heard it performs better than the traditional ext4/xfs/etc on flash drives. Also the pen drive will be used on random hardware (which can be a laptop or a desktop), so what else do I need to consider other than using genkernel's default configuration (the livecd config, which enables all modules)? FWIW, I've been F2FS plus encryption with Arch and haven't had any problems. I'd suggest having anything important backed up somewhere else since it's still seen as experimental (I think). If you're using it on random hardware and want X, you'll have to include the variety of video cards you might run into (Intel, ATI, Nvidia) in your USE flags. Also, be wary of the predictable naming for network interfaces (enp5s0, enp9s2,etc). You might want to disable that feature using something like net.ifnames=0 in your bootloader or a udev rule so you can just set eth0 to DHCP and it will work on most machines.
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 22-Mar-2014 5:42 pm, Brian Hesdorfer zerop...@gmail.com wrote: On 3/21/2014 9:53 PM, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: Hi, Since I don't have a laptop, I'm thinking of installing Gentoo on my USB 3 pen drive. I'll use binpkgs from my desktop so that pen drive lives long. Has anybody tried Samsung's F2FS? I heard it performs better than the traditional ext4/xfs/etc on flash drives. Also the pen drive will be used on random hardware (which can be a laptop or a desktop), so what else do I need to consider other than using genkernel's default configuration (the livecd config, which enables all modules)? FWIW, I've been F2FS plus encryption with Arch and haven't had any problems. I'd suggest having anything important backed up somewhere else since it's still seen as experimental (I think). Of course. Pen drives are as such not very reliable, so backups are a must. If you're using it on random hardware and want X, you'll have to include the variety of video cards you might run into (Intel, ATI, Nvidia) in your USE flags. Will it work out the box without configuration? Also, be wary of the predictable naming for network interfaces (enp5s0, enp9s2,etc). You might want to disable that feature using something like net.ifnames=0 in your bootloader or a udev rule so you can just set eth0 to DHCP and it will work on most machines. NetworkManager helps with that, or may be just run dhcpcd.
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 22/03/2014 15:00, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: On 22-Mar-2014 5:42 pm, Brian Hesdorfer zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com wrote: On 3/21/2014 9:53 PM, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: Hi, Since I don't have a laptop, I'm thinking of installing Gentoo on my USB 3 pen drive. I'll use binpkgs from my desktop so that pen drive lives long. Has anybody tried Samsung's F2FS? I heard it performs better than the traditional ext4/xfs/etc on flash drives. Also the pen drive will be used on random hardware (which can be a laptop or a desktop), so what else do I need to consider other than using genkernel's default configuration (the livecd config, which enables all modules)? FWIW, I've been F2FS plus encryption with Arch and haven't had any problems. I'd suggest having anything important backed up somewhere else since it's still seen as experimental (I think). Of course. Pen drives are as such not very reliable, so backups are a must. If you're using it on random hardware and want X, you'll have to include the variety of video cards you might run into (Intel, ATI, Nvidia) in your USE flags. Will it work out the box without configuration? Also, be wary of the predictable naming for network interfaces (enp5s0, enp9s2,etc). You might want to disable that feature using something like net.ifnames=0 in your bootloader or a udev rule so you can just set eth0 to DHCP and it will work on most machines. NetworkManager helps with that, or may be just run dhcpcd. I suspect you will end up duplicating a lot of work that is already done elsewhere by the binary distros. You'll probably also have your hands full just trying to keep up with video hardware as you'll need at least intel, fglrx and nvidia drivers (plus maybe nouveau and radeon). Are you 100% sure you want to go that route? Sounds like a huge amount of work. In your position, I would rather investigate a LiveCD type solution with a persistent fs layer on top and let the distro do all the heavy lifting. Especially as you don't have the target hardware to hand for testing, you can only test by plugging the stick and seeing if it works. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 22-Mar-2014 6:39 pm, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 22/03/2014 15:00, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: On 22-Mar-2014 5:42 pm, Brian Hesdorfer zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com wrote: On 3/21/2014 9:53 PM, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: Hi, Since I don't have a laptop, I'm thinking of installing Gentoo on my USB 3 pen drive. I'll use binpkgs from my desktop so that pen drive lives long. Has anybody tried Samsung's F2FS? I heard it performs better than the traditional ext4/xfs/etc on flash drives. Also the pen drive will be used on random hardware (which can be a laptop or a desktop), so what else do I need to consider other than using genkernel's default configuration (the livecd config, which enables all modules)? FWIW, I've been F2FS plus encryption with Arch and haven't had any problems. I'd suggest having anything important backed up somewhere else since it's still seen as experimental (I think). Of course. Pen drives are as such not very reliable, so backups are a must. If you're using it on random hardware and want X, you'll have to include the variety of video cards you might run into (Intel, ATI, Nvidia) in your USE flags. Will it work out the box without configuration? Also, be wary of the predictable naming for network interfaces (enp5s0, enp9s2,etc). You might want to disable that feature using something like net.ifnames=0 in your bootloader or a udev rule so you can just set eth0 to DHCP and it will work on most machines. NetworkManager helps with that, or may be just run dhcpcd. I suspect you will end up duplicating a lot of work that is already done elsewhere by the binary distros. You'll probably also have your hands full just trying to keep up with video hardware as you'll need at least intel, fglrx and nvidia drivers (plus maybe nouveau and radeon). Are you 100% sure you want to go that route? Sounds like a huge amount of work. In your position, I would rather investigate a LiveCD type solution with a persistent fs layer on top and let the distro do all the heavy lifting. Especially as you don't have the target hardware to hand for testing, you can only test by plugging the stick and seeing if it works. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com I realize those problems, and that's why I've stayed away till now. I'm running Fedora currently on the pen drive. But the unmatched flexibility of gentoo is tempting me. For example, 3.13.5,6 have problems with USB 3 storage. I've patched the kernel on my desktop and it's working fine. Such things are against mainstream distros. What other distros are suited for this use case?
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 22/03/2014 15:12, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: On 22-Mar-2014 6:39 pm, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com mailto:alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 22/03/2014 15:00, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: On 22-Mar-2014 5:42 pm, Brian Hesdorfer zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com wrote: On 3/21/2014 9:53 PM, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: Hi, Since I don't have a laptop, I'm thinking of installing Gentoo on my USB 3 pen drive. I'll use binpkgs from my desktop so that pen drive lives long. Has anybody tried Samsung's F2FS? I heard it performs better than the traditional ext4/xfs/etc on flash drives. Also the pen drive will be used on random hardware (which can be a laptop or a desktop), so what else do I need to consider other than using genkernel's default configuration (the livecd config, which enables all modules)? FWIW, I've been F2FS plus encryption with Arch and haven't had any problems. I'd suggest having anything important backed up somewhere else since it's still seen as experimental (I think). Of course. Pen drives are as such not very reliable, so backups are a must. If you're using it on random hardware and want X, you'll have to include the variety of video cards you might run into (Intel, ATI, Nvidia) in your USE flags. Will it work out the box without configuration? Also, be wary of the predictable naming for network interfaces (enp5s0, enp9s2,etc). You might want to disable that feature using something like net.ifnames=0 in your bootloader or a udev rule so you can just set eth0 to DHCP and it will work on most machines. NetworkManager helps with that, or may be just run dhcpcd. I suspect you will end up duplicating a lot of work that is already done elsewhere by the binary distros. You'll probably also have your hands full just trying to keep up with video hardware as you'll need at least intel, fglrx and nvidia drivers (plus maybe nouveau and radeon). Are you 100% sure you want to go that route? Sounds like a huge amount of work. In your position, I would rather investigate a LiveCD type solution with a persistent fs layer on top and let the distro do all the heavy lifting. Especially as you don't have the target hardware to hand for testing, you can only test by plugging the stick and seeing if it works. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com mailto:alan.mckin...@gmail.com I realize those problems, and that's why I've stayed away till now. I'm running Fedora currently on the pen drive. But the unmatched flexibility of gentoo is tempting me. For example, 3.13.5,6 have problems with USB 3 storage. I've patched the kernel on my desktop and it's working fine. Such things are against mainstream distros. What other distros are suited for this use case? I don't really know, but that's because I too use Gentoo almost exclusively, nothing else satisfies my OCD need to tweak everything exactly right :-) Pen drives tend to be slow so I think a great hulking monster like Fedora won't suit the use-case. You'd need something smaller and lighter, designed for lower end systems I think. Perhaps check out DistroWatch and try out a few? IIRC they have search and filters that can help pick out the more lean distros -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On 22-Mar-2014 6:56 pm, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 22/03/2014 15:12, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: On 22-Mar-2014 6:39 pm, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com mailto:alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 22/03/2014 15:00, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: On 22-Mar-2014 5:42 pm, Brian Hesdorfer zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com mailto:zerop...@gmail.com wrote: On 3/21/2014 9:53 PM, Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: Hi, Since I don't have a laptop, I'm thinking of installing Gentoo on my USB 3 pen drive. I'll use binpkgs from my desktop so that pen drive lives long. Has anybody tried Samsung's F2FS? I heard it performs better than the traditional ext4/xfs/etc on flash drives. Also the pen drive will be used on random hardware (which can be a laptop or a desktop), so what else do I need to consider other than using genkernel's default configuration (the livecd config, which enables all modules)? FWIW, I've been F2FS plus encryption with Arch and haven't had any problems. I'd suggest having anything important backed up somewhere else since it's still seen as experimental (I think). Of course. Pen drives are as such not very reliable, so backups are a must. If you're using it on random hardware and want X, you'll have to include the variety of video cards you might run into (Intel, ATI, Nvidia) in your USE flags. Will it work out the box without configuration? Also, be wary of the predictable naming for network interfaces (enp5s0, enp9s2,etc). You might want to disable that feature using something like net.ifnames=0 in your bootloader or a udev rule so you can just set eth0 to DHCP and it will work on most machines. NetworkManager helps with that, or may be just run dhcpcd. I suspect you will end up duplicating a lot of work that is already done elsewhere by the binary distros. You'll probably also have your hands full just trying to keep up with video hardware as you'll need at least intel, fglrx and nvidia drivers (plus maybe nouveau and radeon). Are you 100% sure you want to go that route? Sounds like a huge amount of work. In your position, I would rather investigate a LiveCD type solution with a persistent fs layer on top and let the distro do all the heavy lifting. Especially as you don't have the target hardware to hand for testing, you can only test by plugging the stick and seeing if it works. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com mailto:alan.mckin...@gmail.com I realize those problems, and that's why I've stayed away till now. I'm running Fedora currently on the pen drive. But the unmatched flexibility of gentoo is tempting me. For example, 3.13.5,6 have problems with USB 3 storage. I've patched the kernel on my desktop and it's working fine. Such things are against mainstream distros. What other distros are suited for this use case? I don't really know, but that's because I too use Gentoo almost exclusively, nothing else satisfies my OCD need to tweak everything exactly right :-) Pen drives tend to be slow so I think a great hulking monster like Fedora won't suit the use-case. You'd need something smaller and lighter, designed for lower end systems I think. Perhaps check out DistroWatch and try out a few? IIRC they have search and filters that can help pick out the more lean distros -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com It works actually. Using gnome3. I've even used it to run eclipse for working on my project at college and friend's laptop. May be debian would be good, need something stable. Gentoo is stable because it's manually tweaked, but too much work to manage that for random hardware.
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 18:42:46 Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: ---8 What other distros are suited for this use case? 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. This distro is quite close to Gentoo, but not identical. -- Regards Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 7:27 PM, Peter Humphrey pe...@prh.myzen.co.uk wrote: On Saturday 22 Mar 2014 18:42:46 Nilesh Govindrajan wrote: ---8 What other distros are suited for this use case? 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. This distro is quite close to Gentoo, but not identical. -- Regards Peter SystemRescueCD sounds like the best compromise, since its based on gentoo. You can add whatever it is you need. http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_personalize_SystemRescueCd
Re: [gentoo-user] Portable Gentoo (Pen Drive Linux)
On Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:57:22 +, 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. -- Neil Bothwick IBM: Itty Bitty Mentality signature.asc Description: PGP signature
