Ubuntu Live CD Persistent Home on usb key.

[Michael Richter]

On 10/06/05, Paul Sladen <ubuntu at paul.sladen.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Michael Richter wrote:
> > > Does anyone else have suggestions on how to make it work?
> > [..] so I can just plug in my USB key and have my system set up the way
> > it needs to be (particularly useful in a static IP environment) and my
> > home directory comfortably mounted?
> 
> Anything's possible the problem is that there are too many possibilities.
> For your part, can you help define what should happen:
> 
> (a) What devices should be hunted for


Any mountable device suited to having persistent configuration and/or home 
directories. This includes, but is not limited to, floppy disks (bleah!), 
USB disks (both flash and just portable disk drives), PCMCIA devices, etc. 
Basically any block storage device is a candidate for this.

(b) Should they be plane devices; FAT devices with a loopback


Since I have no idea what this means, I cannot answer this question. 

(c) How to ensure that livecd and USB key version match before proceeding


A version check vs. a stored version number, perhaps? 

If you can come up with a good flow-chart/task-list of points and order they
> should be done in (and put it up on the wiki) then I expect somebody else
> can help you take that and work from it.


Or you can just look at distributions like Knoppix or XSoL (if memory 
serves) and see how they did it. Only don't make the user type "config=scan 
home=scan" at boot time -- just assume that the user wants this.

Don't worry, you don't have to know how it works at the lowest level, but it
> needs some more fleshing-out beyond ''plug a device in and it works''. Try
> to describe the steps involved.


Take a Knoppix distro. Go through the steps to make a persistent home and a 
persistent configuration. (Or use XSoL for a different take on it.) Boot. 
For both, type the various magic incantations they demand for these 
situations. (For Knoppix it was "config=scan" and "home=scan". For XSoL I 
can't remember what it was.) Watch the results.

Then do the same in Ubuntu. Just assume, since Ubuntu is supposed to be for 
human beings, not geeks (and my tongue is firmly planted in cheek here, so 
please don't go off on a rant;-)), don't make people type anything in. Just 
scan for home and for configuration automatically and if it's present load 
it. If not, ignore it. (I would guess that if there were multiple 
possibilities you'd need to ask the user which.)

Then for the next trick, make Ubuntu work out of the box with simple printer 
configurations. :-)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20050613/494fb83c/attachment.html>