Porteus booting is not selective!, let's change that....
Posted: 28 Aug 2012, 03:26
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
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