[Wylug-help] Linux Distro on Bootable USB Stick

[Dave Fisher]

Hi All,

I'me fed up with lugging heavy (and bulky) laptops around and can't
bring myself to pay the eye-watering prices for ultra-compact machines
(laptop, palmtop, etc.).  Not least, because whatever you pay, you can't
seem to get some of the features you can find on any old desktop PC.

So I've set aside some time to create a distro on a bootable USB stick,
with the intention of plugging it into other people's PCs like one might
use a Knoppix CD.

Before I launch into the project, I thought it might be wise to ask if
any WYLUG members had useful experience (or merely useful ideas) that
could save me some time and/or grief.

Any suggestions would be useful backup to what I already know, so please
don't limit yourselves to commenting on the following questions.

Having read quite a few HOWTOs, the process of creating a bootable
USB stick and installing a distro on it seems fairly straight forward.

The main problem I can foresee is that of providing a backup boot
method, e.g. booting off a Knoppix-like CD or a Tom's Root 'n' Boot
floppy to accommodate the large number of BIOSes which can't directly
boot USB sticks.

As soon as I thought of this, I realised that I don't know a generic way
of specifying a USB-based kernel and root file system at a bootmanager
prompt (LILO or Grub).

On known hardware it aught to be fairly simple (e.g. the kernel might be
/dev/sda/vmlinuz or /dev/sda1/vmlinuz), but what if I've just plugged
the stick into a PC which has its own scsi and/or usb devices attached?

Is there some obvious way of automatically discovering the available
devices on the system (and the location of the USB stick) from the BIOS
and/or Grub?  

I'm not too bothered about having to pass the kernel and root partition
parameters to Grub manually (if I can figure out what they are), but it
would be nice to do it automatically if possible.

I'm planning to use a stick which is big enough to carry a full distro
with reasonable storage space (min 2GB, probably 4-5GB), so please don't
feel obliged to limit any suggestions to Damn Small Linux-like distros.

OTOH, if anyone has experience which suggests that the read-write speed
of Flash memory is too poor to support standard desktop distros and
apps, I would appreciate any suggestions about how to get around the
problem.

One suggestion which came up in the pub the other day, was to use Qemu
to boot the USB-based Linux distro from within Windows.  That sounds
like an interesting fallback, which I'd like to know more about, but I'd
be inclined to think of it as a 'phase 2' objective, rather than an
immediate goal   ... unless someone knows that it's a lot easier than it
sounds.


Dave

P.S. If anything useful comes of this thread, I'd be happy to write it
up on the proposed WYLUG wiki and do a short talk on it (if there is
sufficient interest).