Install porteus1.2 on USB flash as portable OS

[wayne128]

Greeting,
This is my first time trying Porteus.
What I was looking for is a very fast portable OS for standard USB flash, I wish to use it for demo purpose to would be windows OS converts as well as just for fun on learning Linux.

Here is just a short story on my adventure.
Downloaded porteus 1.2 xfce iso, formatted a 4G USB flash with fat32, used unetbootin to write iso to USB flash, upon rebooting and selecting boot from USB,
It works out of the box, boot time is short

After playing for a while, I can say it is very fast

As those people around me using windows are using various browsers, firefox, chrome, opera and safari, so I just want to install all of them for demonstration to them.

There is a long download for opera module and many dependencies, anyway this is my first time navigating porteus so I am not familiar with it, I have not yet spent enough time learning thru FAQ etc. So please excuse me and don't drive me away.

Finally opera works!!
The only issue is, when I shutdown and reboot, opera icon 'disappeared' but when I click on my desktop with opera's xzm file, the icon becomes alive and it works


Next is to install chrome, and it is easy from the package manager..
however, when I select to run chrome, the browser window flashes for one second and disappear

So I tried a few more times, looking for other version from Slackware repos..
The same thing happened, installation was successful , but browser window opened for a brief second and disappeared.

Then I tried another browser, Seamonkey, no issue to install, no issue to run.
Well, one pleasant surprise after this Seamonkey installation: now google chrome works!!
Why? I do not know, anyone cares to explain?

Next, I tried this USB flash on three other computers
1. a Dell Laptop
2. a NEC laptop
Both of them boot OK, however, it does not allow me to run with the persistent.
and it switch to running the original xfce.
I wonder why, perhaps it is due to fat32 running in Live mode?

3. a samsung laptop
this one cannot boot from USB flash, eventhough the USB boot was selected as first boot device,
may be something to do with UEFI? but I check bios and saw its default to disable UEFI..
can someone help so I can test USB boots from this samsung laptop?

I do not know if fat32 is a right choice, I do not know also if running Live is the right choice.
All I hope is to have a very fast portable OS with persistent ( live or installed) and I would use it for demo to others on their computers

Some other informations:
When i check with gparted, I see the USB flash has about 770MB used.

I also capture lspci to show the computer hardware

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:~$ su
Password: 
root@porteus:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 12)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 12)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev 06)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev a6)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA IDE Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cedar PRO [Radeon HD 5450]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series]
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57788 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
root@porteus:~# 

Here is just a screen captured , running on USB flash
http://i48.tinypic.com/24ct6pg.png



Appreciate any help.
Best regards,

[brokenman]

Welcome to Porteus and thank you for posting your feedback.

The only issue is, when I shutdown and reboot, opera icon 'disappeared' but when I click on my desktop with opera's xzm file, the icon becomes alive and it works.

One the USB device you should find a folder called 'modules' which is inside the 'porteus' folder. Placing your .xzm modules inside this folder means they will be activated during boot.

Well, one pleasant surprise after this Seamonkey installation: now google chrome works!! Why? I do not know, anyone cares to explain?

No doubt seamonkey has the dependencies (required libraries) for chrome to function. You can see which libraries it requires by activating only chrome and then starting it from a terminal. The error message should answer which libraries it is looking for and does not find.

I wonder why, perhaps it is due to fat32 running in Live mode?

Yes. FAT32 is not a native linux file system and you will need to set up a 'save file' which is a kind of container to save your changes into. You can create this using the 'Porteus Settings Centre' found in the system menu.

The Porteus community is a friendly team that is happy to answer any questions you have and will certainly not try to drive you away if there is no reason to do so.

[wayne128]

Thanks brokenman for the welcome and comment.

Now I redo, this time installed to USB flash with ext2, just to see how it goes.

first run allows me to set 'modules' in /mnt/sdb1/porteus/

No doubt seamonkey has the dependencies (required libraries) for chrome to function. You can see which libraries it requires by activating only chrome and then starting it from a terminal. The error message should answer which libraries it is looking for and does not find.

After 'installing google-chrome', run from terminal and see this

Code: Select all

guest@porteus:~$ google-chrome
[1022/203339:ERROR:nss_util.cc(692)] Failed to load NSS libraries.
[24369:24369:3572374786:ERROR:nss_util.cc(692)] Failed to load NSS libraries.
[24363:24363:3572436316:ERROR:nss_util.cc(474)] Error initializing NSS with a persistent database (sql:/home/guest/.pki/nssdb): libmozsqlite3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[24363:24363:3572436497:ERROR:nss_util.cc(483)] Error initializing NSS without a persistent database: NSS error code: -5925
[24363:24377:3572500685:ERROR:keyword_table.cc(495)] Signature is empty
[24363:24377:3572500786:ERROR:web_data_service.cc(657)] Cannot initialize the web database: 1
[24400:24400:3572751513:ERROR:nss_util.cc(452)] Error initializing NSS without a persistent database: libsoftokn3.so: cannot open shared object file: Permission denied
Segmentation fault
guest@porteus:~$ 

Now, installed seamonkey, after successfully installed, activated,
now googl-chrome can be run from either terminal or from gui.
Thanks for the explanation.


Testing to continue...

[wayne128]

With porteus 1.2 'installed' on USB flash with ext2 format, I redo by installing opera, google-chrome, seamonkey, etc
All works like in the case of USB with fat32 format

root@porteus:~# ls /mnt/porteus/modules
font-wqy-zenhei-0.9.45.xzm samba-3.2.5-i486-1.xzm
google-chrome-21.0.1180.57-i386-1sl.xzm samba-3.5.8-i486-1.xzm
opera-12.00.1467-i386-1sl.xzm seamonkey-2.11-i486-1_slack13.37.xzm
ppm-slackware-files.xzm
root@porteus:~# ls

Then just do some customisation..

Reboot, select the first option to boot , oop! no persistent.
I must have missed some simple and yet important steps

Please help
thanks a lot.

[wayne128]

Some updates.

With the help from Ahau via Mini-Chat, the first issue I had was, I had the porteus 1.2 DVD still in the DVD player, thus I got confused on which one was booting.. Ahau had found it was booted from DVD (sr0) , that explained why no persistent..

In order to make this as portable OS, I was instructed to append the file /boot/porteus.cfg with UUID, after doing so my updated line read like this

APPEND initrd=/boot/initrd.xz vga=791 xfce changes=/porteus/ from_dev=UUID:2f3186fb-d7b5-4fd9-9975-2480b167f5ae

Reboot and

Now that I have this USB , ext2 formatted flash drive pre-installed with several browsers, I proceed with testing on some other computers.

Till now, here are some good news, this portable OS works on
1. a Dell Desktop, which is the one used to install modules and play-learning, no issue with the broadcom 57788 gigabit NIC.
2. a Dell laptop, 2006 model, 6+ year old, it works out of the box with wireless.
3. another Dell laptop, 2009 model, I used wired LAN for testing.
This one had problem, no internet out of the box, until I do old trick
modprobe -r tg3
modprobe broadcom
modprobe tg3
to get its broadcom wired lan working.

I am puzzled about this because the first Dell with broadcom57788 works out of the box but this laptop with another broadcom chipset needs modprobing to get it works.. Perhaps it is because of different chip set?

4. a NEC laptop, works out of the box with wireless
5. a desktop with AMD CPU, via wireless USB dongle (realtek chip), wireless works out of the box.

In all cases, I have persistent!!

As many websites need java, I install also iceatea plugin, and it seems to works for first few websites...
when i used google-chrome to check some chart. it complains about icedtea being out-of-date, but I use it anyway and it works ..



Now the USB flash had about 1.22G used. that is very good , at least for me.

At this point, I am not sure if ext2 is the right format to use.
Can someone please help and let me know what format is good for USB flash?

Thanks porteus team for such a fast portable OS in Live persistent mode.

[Ahau]

Glad it's working for you!

Yes, different chipsets will respond differently to driver conflicts. In this case, though, it sounds like it's all about the order in which the drivers are loaded. you could add your instructions to /etc/rc.d/rc.local (see here for more info: http://porteus.org/component/content/ar ... local.html). If that causes the other chipset to work (hopefully it doesn't!) you could move that rc.local file into a module inside your /optional folder (mkdir -p /tmp/2009dell/etc/rc.d && mv /etc/rc.d/rc.local /tmp/2009dell/etc/rc.d && dir2xzm /tmp/2009dell /mnt/sdb1/porteus/optional/2009dell-rclocal.xzm) and then whenever you are booting from the 2009 dell, you could use the cheatcode "load=2009dell".

You can also set up rules inside /etc/modprobe.d to load one driver before another (instead of modprobing in rc.local), and if that works for you it might get your net up a few seconds faster. I've never had to do it myself so I'm not up to speed on the syntax.

Porteus is built to run from a variety of fileystems, so "what's best" is up to you. There's some information on the web about ext2 being better for flash because it doesn't write to disk as often (since it's not journaled). I generally don't use persistent saved changes, but even if I did, i would probably go with ext4. IMO, most flash devices today have enough read/write cycles (and hopefully some degree of wear-leveling by the controller chip) that you're just not going to wear them out with typical use. I'd rather have the extra protection of the journal (even if it is only metadata) and faster performance from ext4.

I'm also forced to use Windows (XP) on a regular basis, so whenever I set up a flash drive for Porteus, I create two partitions. First is FAT (so windows can read it -- Windows chokes if there's more than one partition on a flash drive) and the second is ext4.

HTH