Re: portable Debian

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 11:36:23AM EST, Stefan Monnier wrote:

[..]

- getting your BIOS find your kernel:
- some machines can't boot from USB at all.
- others can, but with some restrictions (typically Apple hardware,
so I end up having to setup my flash key with grub-efi-32,
grub-efi-64, and grub-pc, which is poorly supported under Debian).
- of course yet other machines aren't even using the IA32 instruction
set, so you may need several separate installs (PowerPC/Mips/Arm/...).

What I did on my machine with a BIOS that will never recognize USB
devices, was boot off of the hard drive grub and then point grub2 to the
USB device from the shell that's accessible by hitting 'c' on the grub
boot menu.

With current versions of grub-pc, you have to load the two USB modules
manually, which on my hardware takes for ever. But when you see the USB
light come on, you know you're in business.

- getting your kernel to find the root filesystem. Your external hard
disk partition will typically not have a fixed device name like
/dev/sdb2, so you'll want to refer to it with its UUID, label, or via
LVM naming.

Yes.

- Some udev rules try to give unique and *stable* names to devices by
simply remembering the names they used in the past. On a system that
you move around on many different machines, this can be a pain in the
rear, since your only ethernet card may easily end up named eth7
(because eth0-eth6 were already used for the cards on other machines).
So you may want to "rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-*" in your
/etc/rc.local.

Good point. I've had this 'project' on the back burner for a while and I
think it's time to take another look and finalize portability aspects.

Thanks,

CJ


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