installing linpus linux on a usb drive

[Cesium]

Does anybody know how to install the version of linpus linux that comes with the acer aspire onto a usb drive? Does the recovery disk that ships with the acer provide this option? What i'm trying to accomplish is to have an "experimental operating system" on the usb stick, so if i badly mess anything up, I can just take out the usb drive and boot from my untouched internal sd card- no harm done.

if possible, could you provide the details in a step by step way? I have no experience with linux other than the last 7 days of using this laptop. Thanks to anybody who can help!

 

[JimK]

I haven't tried it, but the recovery DVD does offer the option to install Linpus Linux. Presumably, you could choose whatever drive you want, including a USB drive. But it may not work properly without a little tweaking of /etc/fstab (and maybe other tweaking, too, I don't know). The reason is that when you install it, your USB drive might be, for example, /dev/sdb, but when you try to boot off it it may be /dev/sda. So, sorry I don't have a how-to for you, but if you somewhat know your way around Linux, it should certainly be doable.

 

[FireSoul]

mmm i think your answer might be through VM workshop


didn't try but i will as soon as i am in the mood

 

[Cesium]

so the documentation for the recovery disk says you can install it onto a usb drive- but it doesn't appear to be a persistent install. it's just a recovery application that wipes your hard drive and reinstalls the os fresh onto your internal drive. looks like I may have to install a different version of linux onto the usb drive. Funny- most of my searches shows that many different distros of linux can be made bootable from a usb drive.

 

[JimK]

Cesium, I don't know if you have the same recovery DVD as I have, but on mine it appears that you CAN install it to a USB.

I don't have a large enough USB stick to fully test it, but I did try it with a 2Gib drive.

First, I unhooked the ribbon cable to the HD since it was my wife's computer and she wouldn't be very understanding if I wiped her drive clean .

I stuck the DVD into the optical drive and restarted to boot from CD/DVD. The screen it boots into gives three choices:

• Install - Acer Aspire One
  Create Recovery USB Drive
  Boot from Hard Disk

Install is the default option, so if you don't use the arrow key to choose one of the other options within a few seconds, it will automatically go into the installer.

Once the installer loads, it says:

Welcome
Welcome to the Acer Recovery Management for Aspire one. This program will assist you to return the system in your computer to the factory defaults. Press [->] to cotinue, or press [Exit] to quit.

I pressed ->

The next screen says:

Select Partition

• Whole disk 1 /dev/sda 1920MB

Since I had disconnected the HD, that was the only choice, so I chose it and continued.
The usual advisory box popped up that said:
Warning
All data on the selected partition will be overwritten! Press OK to continue or Cancel to exit.

I chose to nuke it and a progress bar came up.

After about 10 or 15 minutes it aborted with an error:

Error,the program cannot continue. Press OK to exit the program.

So that was as far as I could get with my tiny 2 gig thumb drive. I don't know if you need a 4 or 8 gig drive to make it work, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't fully install onto your thumb drive.

The only problem you might have is that it's a crapshoot trying to figure out which USB drives will boot off which computers.

 

[JimK]

If I may follow up on my previous post, I should have added that it the "Installer" is made for the Aspire One. The Linpus Linux that it installs is customized and if you try to run it on other hardware it will probably boot but give you a lot of errors to fix. For example it may not boot into a GUI, and if that happens I wouldn't know how to fix it since it won't give you a command prompt, either. You would need to drop in a different X configuration file using a different machine. OTOH, it may very well work with similar hardware, such as the EeePC.

So you should be able to install to USB, but it might not work very well or at all on other machines.

 

[Cesium]

Thanks- I'll try that on my old pc first, just in case it decides it wants to reformat my pc's hd. it sounds like you are on to something- and it makes sense that it would stall out on you as the recovery disk is probably trying to write not just the operating system, but probably all the installed apps at the same time. That's a little over 3 gigs. I'm picking up a 4 gig usb drive tomorrow and I also have a tech support email into acer to see if they can shed a little more light on what exactly their recovery dvd is capable of. I'll keel you posted once I get a chance to give it a try- probably next week some time. I hope it gives you a choice of available drives- that'll make all the difference.

 

[JimK]

I'll try that on my old pc first, just in case it decides it wants to reformat my pc's hd. it sounds like you are on to something- and it makes sense that it would stall out on you as the recovery disk is probably trying to write not just the operating system, but probably all the installed apps at the same time. That's a little over 3 gigs.
...
I hope it gives you a choice of available drives- that'll make all the difference.

Yes, it gives you a choice of drives, so make sure you pick /dev/sda rather than /dev/hda or hd-anything, as these will be your hard disks. Your usb drives will be /dev/sda or sdb etc. But if your old PC you're installing from has a SCSI drive in it, it will probably be /dev/sda, so make sure to check the size of the drive you chose to make sure you have the right one. It will erase the entire disk that you choose, including all partitions. Then it will install the three-plus gigs of Linpus Linux AND it will probably attempt to create a 1 gig swap drive. So I'm not sure what will happen when your 4 gig USB runs out of space. Maybe it'll just make a smaller swap and everything will be OK.

Good luck.

 

[KGB]

I tried to install Linpus Lite (Acer version) several times on USB devices - here is, what I investigated:

* yes, you can boot the Recovery DVD from a DVD-drive. But the DVD gives you just whole devices as a target (e.g. sda, sdb sdc - not a single partition).
* what I made was to install on a 8 GByte USB-Memory Stick without trouble.

But afterall I failed to boot the netbook from that stick. You can exchange grub (or press Tab on boot, to show your boot menu at startup). Then you can edit the grub.conf entries - but I was not able to get it boot successfully.

If you edit the command "splash=silent" to "splash=verbose", you will get some messages during boot. I also changed grub.conf to boot from hd1, hd2 etc. It shows me in best case a "kernel panic" message indicating, that the files for root are not found. I also was not able to extract the content of initrd .... to a local folder - to have a closer look at that (gunzip initrd.... | cpio ...) failed for me.

Maybe somebody else will have more luck - but I fear it will be a hard piece of work, to get Linpus Lite booteable from USB-Sticks (I also failed to boot Linpus Lite in a VMware machine - although Linpus Lite Live-CD boots flawless in this environment).