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Texrat's Avatar
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#61
It's more like welcome back.

One problem though: I cannot mount the laptop's NTFS drive from Ubuntu. This is a showstopper, unless I can also fit the Maemo SDK + Qt Developer onto the 4 gig thumb drive.

I'm suspecting it's the disk security (Pointsec) that's the roadblock. I have read of a way to strip Pointsec off, and sooner or later I'll need to, but that means reimaging the laptop and I'm just not up for that right now... so I'm googling for an easier solution...
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thecursedfly's Avatar
Posts: 243 | Thanked: 198 times | Joined on Aug 2009
#62
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
I installed Ubuntu on a thumb drive last night and booted to it from my laptop afterward. After iso download, everything was done in under 5 minutes. Fastest, easiest OS install/setup ever for me. Amazing.
did you follow some online guide? how did you do it? i tried this and this (just to try, not my choice of distro.. it looked simple enough ), but it didn't work for me ("Boot error" on black screen after choosing to boot the pendrive at startup), mainly for one reason probably: I own a macmini and a macbook, both dual booting osx and windows xp, and macs come with Efi intead of Bios.
Also tried making a 1:1 clone of the Slitaz iso on the pendrive, but it doesn't show on the boot screen..

Anybody owning a mac can help me? What I want is a Linux distro on a 8 GB pendrive, possibly to launch from the rEfit boot screen. (And possibly supporting the hardware)

edit, useful info: both are Intel macs

Last edited by thecursedfly; 2009-12-01 at 10:19. Reason: see 'edit'
 
SubCore's Avatar
Posts: 850 | Thanked: 626 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Vienna, Austria
#63
Originally Posted by thecursedfly View Post
Anybody owning a mac can help me? What I want is a Linux distro on a 8 GB pendrive, possibly to launch from the rEfit boot screen. (And possibly supporting the hardware)
here is a very good (but german) how-to for booting on EFI system, and here an english one. there are also a few threads on the ubuntuforums regarding this issue.
it's a bit more involved, i'm afraid, but it should be possible



Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
I'm suspecting it's the disk security (Pointsec) that's the roadblock.
yup, definately. google says that pointsec already provides kernel modules for linux to their encryption solution, but pointsec.com seems to be down, so i can't check.
also, you'd probably need a certificate for decryption, and i have no idea how you could obtain it.


btw, i'm just reexploring wine myself, and it has come a loooong way.
last time i tried it, you had to be a bit adventurous if you installed it. wine was actually the only application that managed to completely crash my linux boxes
but now, the newer games mostly work out of the box! i'm seriously impressed by the wine team's progress over the past few years.
 
thecursedfly's Avatar
Posts: 243 | Thanked: 198 times | Joined on Aug 2009
#64
Originally Posted by SubCore View Post
here is a very good (but german) how-to for booting on EFI system, and here an english one. there are also a few threads on the ubuntuforums regarding this issue.
it's a bit more involved, i'm afraid, but it should be possible
Wow, quite some difference between the links from my post and your second link... xD
(I don't speak german, only english, italian, dutch, and some french)
I need some easier solution.. x)
Thanks anyway, I'll check on the ubuntu forums you linked
 
SubCore's Avatar
Posts: 850 | Thanked: 626 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Vienna, Austria
#65
Originally Posted by thecursedfly View Post
Wow, quite some difference between the links from my post and your second link... xD
hehe yeah, sorry. that was the only one i found quickly
and it's not even about a live USB system...

the german link is actually exactly what you need, and you don't need to understand every bit of it.

here a short translation (i'm currently at work, so i shouldn't spend too much time here *g*) of the most important parts:

*) install rEFIt on the mac
*) prepare the ubuntu USB stick
*) get grub2efi (aka bootusb.tar.gz)
*) copy the "efi" folder from that archive to the usb stick
*) edit /efi/boot/grub.cfg on the stick and make sure the filename of the ISO is correct

that's basically it.
the rest of this article are troubleshooting suggestions for the video driver on macbooks.
adding "fix_video" in the menuentry for your ubuntu image, and adding
Driver "fbdev"
to /etc/X11/xorg.conf should fix video issues.

with the folder /efi/boot, rEFIt should list this USB stick as a possible boot option.
 
thecursedfly's Avatar
Posts: 243 | Thanked: 198 times | Joined on Aug 2009
#66
Originally Posted by SubCore View Post
hehe yeah, sorry. that was the only one i found quickly
and it's not even about a live USB system...

the german link is actually exactly what you need, and you don't need to understand every bit of it.

here a short translation (i'm currently at work, so i shouldn't spend too much time here *g*) of the most important parts:

*) install rEFIt on the mac
*) prepare the ubuntu USB stick
*) get grub2efi (aka bootusb.tar.gz)
*) copy the "efi" folder from that archive to the usb stick
*) edit /efi/boot/grub.cfg on the stick and make sure the filename of the ISO is correct

that's basically it.
the rest of this article are troubleshooting suggestions for the video driver on macbooks.
adding "fix_video" in the menuentry for your ubuntu image, and adding
Driver "fbdev"
to /etc/X11/xorg.conf should fix video issues.

with the folder /efi/boot, rEFIt should list this USB stick as a possible boot option.
thanks, I'll try that at home and let you know; on the ubuntu forums I found that somebody installed opensuse from live cd directly to the usb drive, and refit recognised it as a bootable device after, thus, opensuse should configure grub correctly.. i'll try that too if I find an empty cd somewhere/buy one.. xP
 
jeremiah's Avatar
Posts: 170 | Thanked: 261 times | Joined on Feb 2009 @ Gothenburg, Sweden
#67
You can skip over Ubuntu and go right to Debian. Debian is what Ubuntu is based on, it is widely used on servers, and is also easy to install.

Debian has the largest number of packages, supports the most architectures, and is the most free distro in terms of software freedom.

You cannot go wrong with debian.
 
SubCore's Avatar
Posts: 850 | Thanked: 626 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Vienna, Austria
#68
Originally Posted by jeremiah View Post
Debian has the largest number of packages, supports the most architectures, and is the most free distro in terms of software freedom.
... but unlike ubuntu it's not exactly beginner-friendly
 
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