In a long past architecture the "OS" was in hardware based literal ROM. And a further question came up that shows my ignorance of real applied usages. The full experiment is in direct result of my NOT knowing in advance how to make this work.And wanting to have it for daily use if it does. Since it has become trivial to run Ramdisk Distros I am planning on an experiment. Recently I noticed several USB cards have one or more ports facing towards the INSIDE of the case. The logical to me use will be loading some bootable from USB drive version onto a properly sized flash drive. So far it looks like a "so what" trivial re-inventing trip. This is more my asking for direction in both WHICH distro is suited to do this with and some help in directions for making it do what is needed for this. The devil for me is in the details of altering that installed distro so it can use a drive not part of the same one it lives on. YES this appears to be a tangent or even restatement of the post RE: OS and Data isolation. This is a case detached from that for a different reason. Flash memories of some cheaper design have limited write cycles. Having the OS on a flash drive that only gets written to when the OS itself is changed as in moving from a 5.x up to 7.06 type change. So the flash will not be "worn out" -- Oren Beck 816.729.3645
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 7:09 AM, Oren Beck <orenbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
Recently I noticed several USB cards have one or more ports facing towards the INSIDE of the case. The logical to me use will be loading some bootable from USB drive version onto a properly sized flash drive. So far it looks like a "so what" trivial re-inventing trip. This is more my asking for direction in both WHICH distro is suited to do this with and some help in directions for making it do what is needed for this.
You're trying to re-invent the wheel. Google is your friend: http://lifehacker.com/software/linux/how-to-install-linux-on-a-usb-drive-160... -- Chris
--- Oren Beck <orenbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
Flash memories of some cheaper design have limited write cycles. Having the OS on a flash drive that only gets written to when the OS itself is changed as in moving from a 5.x up to 7.06 type change. So the flash will not be "worn out"
If you can mount most of the "frequently-used" stuff on an actual hard drive, you could simply use the USB drive as /boot, which gets written to only when the kernel changes. This sounds roughly like what you want in the first place. ____________________________________________________________________________________ You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost. http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text5.com
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:
--- Oren Beck <orenbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
Flash memories of some cheaper design have limited write cycles. Having the OS on a flash drive that only gets written to when the OS itself is changed as in moving from a 5.x up to 7.06 type change. So the flash will not be "worn out"
If you can mount most of the "frequently-used" stuff on an actual hard drive, you could simply use the USB drive as /boot, which gets written to only when the kernel changes. This sounds roughly like what you want in the first place.
THANK you !!! That is perhaps the dragon slayer. Sighing and fumbling for the Linux in a nutshell book... Ah - guess I know where this evening is going to:> -- Oren Beck 816.729.3645
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Oren Beck <orenbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:
If you can mount most of the "frequently-used" stuff on an actual hard drive, you could simply use the USB drive as /boot, which gets written to only when the kernel changes. This sounds roughly like what you want in the first place.
THANK you !!! That is perhaps the dragon slayer.
Sighing and fumbling for the Linux in a nutshell book... Ah - guess I know where this evening is going to:>
Puppy and DSL have been heading down this road for some time. Recent Puppy releases (ie. 3) and DSL (ie 4) have a very nice setup to store the OS as basically read-only files, and also to store software "modules" or packages on the same filesystem, or a different one on another drive. It is extremely simple to setup Puppy to boot from a read only USB drive from which it will then scan the system for other volumes, either USB flash or ATA hard drives, which have a set of files that can contain user storage, programs, etc. These modern releases are being purpose built with this very kind of idea behind them. I recently came into a system that has USB boot and a fairly decent CPU (my first P4 didn't have USB boot, bah!) and I've been thinking of doing a Puppy or DSL boot volume on USB and using the HDD for extra program storage (which are only read to RAM and executed there and have configs written to simple user files) and user file storage. Puppy automatically asks about encryption of the user file "container" it generates, for added peace of mind. If you look at no other distros, Puppy and DSL won't likely fail you at being suitable for this task. Jon.
participants (4)
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Christofer C. Bell -
Jon Pruente -
Leo Mauler -
Oren Beck