[Inx] INX USB stick, "Persistent Mode"

Peter Garrett inx-one at optusnet.com.au
Sun Nov 23 04:57:07 PST 2008


Hi,

I've run a few experiments to make a bootable USB INX, with (or without)
so-called "persistent mode"...

As some of you will know, it's trivially easy to make a bootable INX USB
stick with the "Unetbootin" program, but, well, It Wasn't Invented Here
(tm)  ;-)

 So far, I've succeeded in making such an animal, but there are a
few issues in the process.

1) There's a mistake in the hardy casper script that stops "Persistent"
mode from working. The solution is either to unpack the initrd.gz, edit
the line concerned, and repack, or to correct the error in the casper
script and rebuild. I did both... the rebuilding solution is actually
much easier and only requires a tiny change in Casper: -

sed -i 's/,mode=755//'   (just remove the 'mode=755' and preceding comma
in line 408 - it's the only occurrence of 755, so it's easily found).

2) INX uses the rather nice "usbmount" program for automatic USB
mounting. Since "persistent" mode uses a second partition on the USB
stick, on boot both /media/usb0 and /media/usb1 are mounted. This is
fine except that on *reboot*, because the state is saved, you see both
mounted twice. They are not in fact mounted twice of course, just
that /etc/mtab retains a record of the mounts from the previous run.

I think 2) is probably easily fixed by adding a umount command to the
shutdown scripts... but I haven't tried it yet... stay tuned.

3) Purely cosmetic... making the bootable USB stick uses syslinux, and
syslinux doesn't understand the isolinux config for the boot-up screen.
This could be fixed by using a new background picture format and various
other tweaks, but so far I haven't bothered.

So where's the code, I hear you ask? Well, I need to script this, but
once I have a script to do it, I'll let you know. Should be fairly
simple... (Famous Last Words)

Peter

-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 8.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html



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