USB booting :: DSL Embedded + Ubuntu on USB?



Your method sounds fine, although I cannot verify the ubuntu part.

Take the qemu line (other lines are mostly dos commands) and take out the ".exe" and it should work.
Alrighty, have succeeded in installing DSL embedded, and prepping for Ubuntu.  Runs in Qemu and BIOS.  Running into an issue with the partition though: I have a partition specifically for DSL to save to, formatted EXT3.  Can save back to it (though with some difficulty) in BIOS boot mode (have to keep changing permissions to R/W), but no dice on QEMU boot.  I understand that QEMU is a sandbox and needs to be shown where to save stuff, but should it not be possible to point it at the second partition (hda2 in this case)?  I just don't want to have 2 separate backup/restore locations depending on how I boot it.  

Secondly, is it possible to insert a script in the .bat and .sh QEMU boot files to take advantage of KQEMU?  It takes up very little extra space on the drive, and I would like any and all extra speed I can get out in the wilds.  the QUB.bat file I am going to use for Ubuntu QEMU has a script for KQEMU, but obviously net start KQEMU is not going to work in a linux environment.  

Finally, will using the frugal install default preserve the life of the pendrive?  I don't want to kill this little guy with excessive writes.  Thanks, will keep updating as I go along.

                                          D33p
The easiest solution I've seen with qemu is to use a virtual harddisk for it, and then for native DSL boots use the cheatcode "qemu" - see readme.txt for more info.  Of course there are other solutions.

The KQEMU module is required to be compiled, etc. and inserted into the host machine - so I'll be assuming you have admin/root privileges on your target computers?  (did you try modprobe kqemu for linux) And then make sure you take off the -no-kqemu flags and you should be set.  With newer stock kernels that include KVM (2.6.2x ?), you could use the modified qemu and take advantage of it (assuming your cpu is capable).

Frugal is the best choice - but you may want to have it mount the root partition (the one that contains the DSL/KNOPPIX image) as read-only.  If you haven't already, take off "frugal" from your list of cheatcodes.  There's already been several threads on this type of topic though.
This frugal thing can be done manually.

Currently running DSL off my hard drive together with Debian Sarge + Sid. All I did was mount -o loop the ISO and 'cp -av' everything onto /mnt/hda8.
Here's my GRUB entry in  menu.lst for DSL:
title           DamnSmallLinux 3.3
root            (hd0,7)
kernel          /boot/isolinux/linux24  fromhd=/dev/hda8 ro acpi=off  \
apm=power-off quiet noscsi nofw nousb noicons toram lowram vga=791 \
norestore
initrd          /boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
boot

The file /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX in the ISO is mounted as UnionFS; any changes you make to files when DSL is running occurs in RAM. So nothing at all is written to your USB drive except for the homedir backup tarball that will be saved when you shutdown. This will be called user.tar.gz and will be very small unless you increase your firefox cache size.

As for Ubuntu, if you get the LiveUSB version it must be technically similar.
Well that depends if he's using unionfs :) but if he has enough memory, using legacy with legacy extensions (i.e. .dsl's instead of .unc's) might be better since it would save reads, unless you copied it into the ramdisk first.

And isn't the backup tarball called backup.tar.gz?
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