[TriLUG] booting an external disk with grub 0.97

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2015, Steve Litt via TriLUG wrote:

> Hi Joe,
>
> You have two problems:
>
> 1) You need to teach your friend Python in a Linux environment

actually it's teach python in a sane environment. I tried it in winxp about 5yrs 
ago and it didn't work. According to Lance, it works in windows now.

> 2) You have a fascinating boot problem

I can't believe my luck ;-)

I thought this was going to be quick and easy. Just hand him a dd copy of my 
laptop drive, plug it into the usb port,  and boot his machine off it.

> #1 is probably pretty simple: Make yourself up a Ubuntu live thumb
>   drive with Python. Or just bring a Linux computer to his house for
>   him to work on.


he needs to be able to play with something in the week. I have tried Ubuntu
but I can't remember why it wsn't acceptable.

> #2 I'm wondering if you *should* have an initramfs. What distro, what
>   version?

Slackware 13. I've been using it for 20yrs. I'm very happy with it. I have 9 
desktops of xterms. That's all I need.

> All that udev stuff gets done in the initramfs on Debian
>   Wheezy and Manjaro OpenRC edition. Is your OS by any chance normally
>   a systemd init?

no

>
> But guess what: You're working an edge case here :-). Booting from a USB 
> connected spinning drive is just not how the distro guys probably envisioned 
> their system being used.

apparently, but I can't imagine why it's a exception. It seems like an obvious 
non-intrusive way of having a live distro.

> An initramfs is simply a gzipped newc format cpio archive of a tree,

thanks. Looks like I'm going to have learn about all of this. I'm overjoyed :-(

> It's very possible that you could make a simple initramfs enabling you to boot 
> to your USB attached hard drive, with no references at all to the internal 
> hard drive.

I'll have to, the internal drive is windows.

> Is all this way too much work to set up a Python tutorial environment? Heck 
> yeah! Is it justified by your new understanding of how your intricate boot 
> works. Heck yeah!

sometimes I would just like it to work, so I can do things like teach python.

Thanks

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) austintek (dot) com - azimuthal equidistant
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