Sunday 21 December 2008

Vinux on a USB Pendrive!


Initially I had been installing Vinux to a USB pendrive using Unetbootin as the Ubuntu USB Installer would not recognise the Vinux Live CD. This worked well but the Unetbootin gui does not support Orca as it is uses QT rather than GTK, it does not run from a terminal, and it does not support persistent storage. Upon investigation I discovered that the Ubuntu USB Installer was looking for a hidden folder on the original Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD called .disk which contained three files: casper-uuid-generic, info and release_note_url. As long as this is in the root directory of the CD the Ubuntu USB Installer works, allowing you to install Vinux onto a USB pendrive with a persistant storage file, the size of which can be specified during installation. I will incorporate this file into the next version of Vinux, but in the meantime if you want to try this yourself here is a quick guide.

1. Place the Vinux.iso image in your home folder (e.g. /home/vinux) along with the hidden .disk file from the original Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD. Then open a terminal.

2. Create a mount point for the Vinux CD iso image by typing:
  • mkdir /home/vinux/CD-iso
3. Mount the Vinux.iso image to this mount point by typing:
  • sudo mount -o loop /home/vinux/Vinux.iso /home/vinux/CD-iso
4. Copy the contents of the mounted Vinux iso into a temp folder by typing:
  • cp -r /home/vinux/CD-iso /home/vinux/USB-iso
5. Copy the hidden .disk folder to the temp folder by typing:
  • sudo cp -r /home/vinux/.disk /home/vinux/USB-iso
6. Copy the contents of the temp folder into a new USB iso image by typing:
  • mkisofs -r -o /home/vinux/Vinux-USB.iso /home/vinux/USB-iso
7. Unmount the Vinux CD iso image by typing:
  • sudo umount /home/vinux/CD-iso
8. Delete the mount point for the Vinux CD iso image by typing:
  • rmdir /home/vinux/CD-iso
9. Delete the temp folder by typing:
  • sudo rm -rf /home/vinux/USB-iso
10. Insert a pendrive of 1Gb or greater and start the Ubuntu USB Installer from the Applications menu. Point it to the new Vinux-USB.iso in your home directory and it will install it and create a persistent storage file of whatever size you specify.
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