On 12/29/2015 12:51 AM, Ross Boylan wrote:
I think if I had run debian installer from one flash drive and installed onto another flash drive things would have gone more smoothly.
Likely, so.
I managed to get things mostly working. It was extremely ugly. I'll try to post full details later, but basically inserted USB stick in my main machine overwrote start with zero's to wipe out traces of the boot for the iso, which seemed to make grub-install unwilling to do anything. chroot into the disk, edit grub's device map, and install. Then I stuck the stick in the diskless machine and booted; there were a bunch of errors in the early boot process about missing files, but the system started. I reran update-initramfs and update-grub and rebooted. Things seem mostly OK, although there are weird vestigas of the live cd, like update-initramfs is linked to live-update-initramfs.
Hopefully you learned something along the way.
The system is a bit sluggish; maybe ext4 on lvm wasn't the best choice for it.
I don't use LVM on any of my SOHO machines, USB flash drive or otherwise.I've found that interactive desktop use can be choppy when running from a USB flash drive, especially if the computer is fast and the flash drive is slow (e.g. USB 2.0). The most responsive solution for diskless workstations would probably be Linux Terminal Server and lots of RAM in the clients:
http://ltsp.org/
David