Linux on a usb drive

Today I decided to play around with Linux on a usb drive. I want slackware but could not find zip slack. So I googled a bit and found wowarea and damn small linux these boch lead me to Slax. Slax is based on slackware. So I figured I better Download it.

I installed the Slax image on my usb stick, a 4GB pleomax, unfortunately I had to use window$ for this installation :( Nevertheless, the installation went smoothely and Slax booted smothely on my first usb boot.

I then attempted to create a specific package for Slax, namely netbeans IDE as I'll have to use this in my new job. I installed netbeans on a redhat machine, yawm, and used the slackware package approach.

I installed the netbeans IDE, the profiler, the c/c++ support and the CLDC packages. I also had to install the latest JDK to get the darn thing running. See previous posts for this. Then, I created the packages from this installation. I grouped all the netbeans packages into one huge slackware package, but I'll divide these into a package each later.

Once the package was done I searched for the tgz2mo program, but couldn't find it anywhere for redhat. So I booted with the pendrive and mounted /tmp to a place on the stick with enough space, 1-2 GB.

Then, then I used tgz2mo and the package was created, I inserted the package with uselivemod and fired up the netbeans IDE. This did not start directly since it could not find JDK. I then installed the JDK module and activated netbeans with --jdk-path pointing to the JDK installation.

That fired it up, everything but the emulator worked, this was due to the same GLIBC problem as I met earlier on the redhat installation. I installed the Slax module containing the GLIBC library but that completely broke the Slax installation.

It seems like the boot attempts to install the 2.5 files so I cant boot slax now. I'll see if I can remove the GLIBC 2.5 files and boot teh darn thing again. Then I'll do a proper GLIBC package for Slax created from my fresh slackware distro.

I'll let ya know once I have it running again.

Upgrading to openoffice 2.0

Since the Linux box updating has now started I also decided to update the open office package. First I had to rid the old installation:
rpm -e openoffice.org-i18n openoffice.org-kde openoffice.org-libs openoffice.org

The above removed all openoffice 1.1 dependencies. Then the latest open office package needs to be installed:
tar -zxvf OOo_2.2.1_LinuxIntel_install_da_rpm.tar.gz

Since the installation script did not seem to work for me, I decided to use RPM to get the packages in manually. To avoid dependency problems here a one liner:
ls *.rpm |xargs rpm -ivh

Yes I like to know what is going on ;)
Now all you have to do is create the links you need for the old open office desktop links to work,
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/swriter /usr/bin/oowriter
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/scalc /usr/bin/oocalc
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/sdraw /usr/bin/oodraw

Finally a link to the openoffice common program:
ln -s /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/soffice /usr/bin/soffice

That's it you're now ready for the open document standard. Have phun!? Notice, that my OO could not import the old user settings? Seems there was an error in a script file. This may very well be because my installation was way to old!

Firefox and thunderbird upgrade

Today I updated to firefox and thinderbird version 2.0. I also decided to get rid of the redhat packages as the firefox and thunderbird updates are usually distributed in tarballs . Change to superuser and then issue:
rpm -e firefox thunderbird

While you're at it remove the whole old mozilla stuff as well since it's nolonger needed. On my system I had to do:
rpm -e mozilla-devel mozilla-js-debugger mozilla-dom-inspector mozilla-mail devhelp mplayerplug-in mozilla

Notice: You can get the dependencies by issuing just rpm -e mozilla, since the dependencies will keep the rpm manager from removing the package.

To remove the rpm's, Next, get rid of the old version's entries in /usr/lib/firefox-xx and /usr/lib/thunderbird-xx by:
su -c "rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox-xxx /usr/lib/thunderbird-xx"

Now extract the latest firefox and thunderbird to the preferred location by:
tar -zxvf thunderbird-2.0.tar.gz --directory /usr/lib
tar -zxvf firefox-2.0.tar.gz --directory /usr/lib

create the links to the installed applications in the /usr/bin/ directory by:
ln -s /usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-2.0/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Testing the installation:
firefox --version
Should produce something like:
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2007 mozilla.org

Edit:- 03 September 2007:
Just after the installation I wanted to add the new calendar support to Thunderbird, and the local weather should be viewable in my new Firefox :) I just love these small application addons