September 06, 2007

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.

2 comments:

Anders Poulsen said...

Tillykke med dit nye job. Jeg har set efter dig herude hos Nokia, hvor jeg er konsulent for tiden og undret mig over hvor du var.
I øvrigt mangler du at opdatere din email adresse på LinkedIn. Man kan jo ikke komme i kontakt med dig, når adressen stadig er @nokia.com.

Anders Poulsen said...

BTW: så er jeg jo selvstændig konsulent, så hvis I skulle få brug for en udvikler, må du jo bare ringe eller skrive :-)