Re: Quick and dirty "debian live" on USB stick.
On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 01:30:43AM -0500, Chris Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 09:45:11AM EST, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>
> > > I'm playing with the idea of copying my laptop's debian lenny
> > > partition to a USB stick that I can take with me when traveling.
> >
> > I have a "Live USB Debian" system that follows this idea (i.e. it's
> > just a plain normal Debian install, except it works off of a USB
> > stick).
>
> > > . clone the lenny partition to /dev/sda1
> > > . install grub to /dev/sda
> > > . make adjustments to the contents of /dev/sda1
>
> > > The trouble is that I don't have a machine that can boot off of a
> > > USB stick to test ahead of time.
> >
> > You can do some of the tests by putting the vmlinuz and initrd.img on
> > your harddrive and telling them to mount / from the USB stick.
>
> Good point - I guess simply adding an entry to grub.cfg with the UUID of
> my root partition on the the USB stick should do it.
>
> I guess the only thing that I won't be able to test will be grub on the
> USB stick. Probably wise to bring a rescue CD along first time around.
>
> > That will already help you figure out some of the tricky things
> > (e.g. how to specify the right device to use to mount the USB stick:
> > either use partition labels, UUIDs, or use LVM volumes).
>
> I'll definitely use the UUID.
>
> > > Since I'm running the stock lenny kernel, I shouldn't have problems
> > > with differences in hardware, but I'm a little concerned that udev
> > > might not cooperate.
> >
> > The only typical problems are things like the
> > /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-* files, so every time you use your
> > system on a new machine, the "new" ethernet device will appear under a
> > new name (eth0, eth1, eth2, ...). You can solve it by adding a script
> > which removes those files at boot.
>
> Well, I guess that since my pcmcia nic won't be there on the target
> system(s), I should remove the corresponding udev rule for instance.
>
> What does udev do in this respect, anyway? Probe the system at startup
> and set up the devices for the hardware it detects?
>
> So I guess the rules need to be cleaned up every time you know you are
> using a given system for the last time?
>
You could try deleting the file that creates the persistent network
interfaces:
/etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules (on my Lenny system,
anyway)
I'm not sure what negative side-effects there might be, but I did this
on my Debian-Live system so that my wired interface would always be
"eth0". It seems to work, but I'm sure there's a better way.
-Rob
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