At the office my desktop runs Porteus 1.2 in HD install (partition 3 with 32 GB ext4 fs); it can be started from first partition, with our normal Porteus welcome page, to the "traditional" OS.
This afternoon I tried to start up this machine from a pen drive with Porteus 1.2 also: I selected bios to boot from usb, but the stupid machine switched from syslinux in pendrive to live Porteus in the HD!
Elemental, Watson!, the machine starts looking for a partition containing a file named porteus-v1.2-i486.sgn, and the first one she finds is enough for her!!!. Ok, I had to erase this file and the machine did what I wanted; before turning off, I copied the file back from pen drive to HD, so it would start next time.
But I realized what was going on by the third time I started the system...A newbie had not understand it at all (if yes, then we were dealing with an "advanced" newbie).
I am trying to find a way to avoid others that situation derived from my "elegant" HD install, without complicating things too much. Somehow the content of the .sgn file should identify the device it belongs to.
Maybe the lin_starts_here (win_start_here) mechanism could do that, writing the device-id to the .sgn file and at transfer, when the .sgn file is found, syslinux could check if the found file belongs to the entity demanding connection; some sort of hand-shake.
I leave the idea in hands of our developers, that is meat for Tom and Jay, I think. That would make Porteus 1.3 much better. Request for comments...
Regards
Old William
Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
- wread
- Module Guard
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Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
Porteus is proud of the FASTEST KDE ever made.....(take akonadi, nepomuk and soprano out and you will have a decent OS).
The Porteus Community never sleeps!
The Porteus Community never sleeps!
Re: Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
wread if you use extlinux you can't load two device at same time ,you have a mix of all and a big headache,you can try to rename the changes folder,but for me one time work and other not.i have two hard disk like a big usb pen device,and if i plug in a usb pen i have some trouble btw with porteus in and booting from pen,i think only grub make the trick but grub with ext4 support.you can try the uuid cheatcode if work.
- brokenman
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Re: Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
Take a look through the cheatcodes.txt document in the boot/docs folder. You can use:
from_dev and from_dir together (as hamza stated) to pinpoint your USB install. Of course we are always open to ideas to simplify things via a menu. You can also use the UUID of the drive which is not exactly user friendly ... but effective.
from_dev and from_dir together (as hamza stated) to pinpoint your USB install. Of course we are always open to ideas to simplify things via a menu. You can also use the UUID of the drive which is not exactly user friendly ... but effective.
How do i become super user?
Wear your underpants on the outside and put on a cape.
Wear your underpants on the outside and put on a cape.
- Ahau
- King of Docs
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Re: Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
'sgnfile=' is another way this could be handled, by using unique sgn's, e.g. port32-1.2onhd.sgn
While echoing the uuid into the .sgn file and doing a 'handshake' would effectively force Porteus to run using the files on the boot device, it would not be able to handle scenarios where, for example, you want to use porteus info on your hard drive while booting from your flash drive; the from_dev method works in all cases (using from_dev=UUID: being the best, as brokenman stated).
I'm currently trying to get extlinux to boot a kernel and initrd from a device/partition other than the boot device (where extlinux is installed)...maybe there's an easy config option for this, but I haven't found it yet.
While echoing the uuid into the .sgn file and doing a 'handshake' would effectively force Porteus to run using the files on the boot device, it would not be able to handle scenarios where, for example, you want to use porteus info on your hard drive while booting from your flash drive; the from_dev method works in all cases (using from_dev=UUID: being the best, as brokenman stated).
I'm currently trying to get extlinux to boot a kernel and initrd from a device/partition other than the boot device (where extlinux is installed)...maybe there's an easy config option for this, but I haven't found it yet.
Please take a look at our online documentation, here. Suggestions are welcome!
Re: Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
Extlinux (and isolinux/syslinux) doesn't know how to navigate other partitions and filesystems other than the one it's installed on (unless things have changed a lot since I looked). But grub can do this:Ahau wrote:I'm currently trying to get extlinux to boot a kernel and initrd from a device/partition other than the boot device (where extlinux is installed)...maybe there's an easy config option for this, but I haven't found it yet.
Code: Select all
menuentry "Porteus Save Changes" --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd1,msdos2)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root <my-uuid>
linux /boot/porteus/vmlinuz from_dev=UUID:<my-uuid> sgnfile=porteusSSD.sgn changes=/dev/sda6/porteus/changes/ vga=791 noautologin vga_detect
initrd /boot/porteus/initrd.xz
}