Mint LInux on flash SD (and Debian)

Meant to blog about getting Debian stable (squeeze -- see Toy Story) installed on my main box.

32 bit CPU and Adobe's rush to the 64 bit future that is not means that I don't have current flash there, which is disappointing for the kids. Some of their youtube  no longer works.

(I keep having to remind them that sites linked to from youtube are not guaranteed safe from malware and worse, but most of those sites are among those that no longer work.)

gnash works on some stuff. Iceweasel is way behind. Slashdot's ads sometimes kills it. Google's chrome works fine. The Gimp is great. Libre Office needs one to load extra fonts for the Japanese, but that's true in any distro.

Stable meaning a bit old is okay. Not really stale yet.

While messing around with the Fedora security spin on my netbook, I tried Mint on an SD card. It drags just a little, but nothing like Fedora on a USB (usb2.0, don't have or want usb3.0).

Let me repeat that. In bold:

Linux Mint is useable on a netbook (64bit) from an SD flash card.

[Update:]

But it contains Mono stuff. Tomboy and Banshee. And the Mate desktop has MS-Common-Language-Infrastructure libraries instead of the untainted versions. 

Darn.

Haven't found gold yet.

[End-update]

You can surf, in real time, use libre office, etc. In a live CD size image.

Here's how I got it onto the SD card. (/dev/sdb is where the card ended up. If you try this, remember to make sure you understand the dd and mount and umount commands before you start. Make sure you know where the card gets assigned under the device tree, because it may not be at /dev/sdb .)

cd /home/sharing/imageheap 

# or wherever you keep the downloaded images

umount /dev/sdb1 

sudo dd if=linuxmint-13-cinnamon-dvd-nocodecs-64bit.iso of=/dev/sdb

The if and the of should be on the same line as the sudo dd, of course.

And, yeah, I did mean /dev/sdb there. The whole card, not the first partition.

Well, there are lots of stories out on the web about flash media for live stuff. Each manufacturer takes different shortcuts. Both with the flash devices and in the BIOS of the machine.)

Some people recommend partitioning the flash drive, but you have to already have tools and a pretty high-level of knowledge to get that to work.

Keeping it in a single partition seems to work best when you don't have the tools or knowledge.

Some people find dd-ing the image to the first partition (sdb1 in my case) to work best, but that didn't work for me. My notebook didn't like the MBR (or absence thereof) mixed with the ISO9960 image.

Fedora's live USB tool didn't work for Mint. Not surprising, since they play with the MBR.

Maya. Don't have time to try all the options, like playing with Nadia instead of Maya. Going to get Mint-Debian into a spare partition on the main box to play with that. But Mint may be what I want to replace my sister's now ancient iBook G4 with.

(Wish I had time to play with building Mint on PPC. Wish my own iBook G4 hadn't died after being dropped too many times. Wish I had the money to replace my shoulder bag before the strap breaks.)

(Woops. s/play/study/ above.)

Getting Fedora 17 running on my netbook.

Okay, okay. I do need Fedora to study for the LPIC 2.

(Looking really carefully at Mint, for when I'm done and the root partition fills up.)

So, getting Fedora updated to v. 17 --

Start with the netinstall image. Use Fedora 16 live USB utility to load it onto a USB thumb drive.

yum install liveusb-creator

if you need it. (You can get the utility for MSWindows, too. And see the Fedora wiki on it for more details and options. It looks like there's a tool for Debian, too, I need to check that.)

I had to run liveusb-creator from the command line with the option to write the MBR (as suggested when it wrote the image the first time). The first try without the fix failed, but the second try with the MBR fixed worked. The command line with the option looks like this:

liveusb-creator -m

or

liveusb-creator --reset-mbr

The MBR may have been the reason my attempts at dd-ing the image didn't work.

So much, so good. Boot the USB image, either by using the BIOS settings to give USB devices priority in the boot order, or, if your BIOS supports it, by watching the first few seconds of bootup and hitting the key that it says allows you to choose the boot media.

I installed the minimal because I really wanted to keep control of the process. Was very careful to select custom layout. (Do not select any thing else or you will lose your data, if you are trying to do a "fresh" install like I was doing.)

Only set it up to grab the old swap partition and /tmp partition and the old root partition. Was very, very careful not to touch the old /home partition. (Did I say that enough times?)

Should have copied out the /etc first. Should have gotten a list of installed packages from yum before I shot myself in the foot trying to upgrade from F16 to F17 the easy way that doesn't work.

Gave it a root password, but no other users. Didn't want to have clutter in /home, since that is where the old home partition will mount.

Next, I asked around, to see if splitting /usr off after a successful install might work, and, no, the boot process needs stuff they've gone and moved to /usr. (See my diatribe linked above about root filling up.) So I'm stuck with a small monolithic root partition.

So, (if /dev/sda10 is my /home partition) log in as root and (back up /dev/sda10 first and)

blkid /dev/sda10 > home_uuid.text

vi /etc/fstab home_uuid.text

and use the :next and :prev vi commands to ytl (yank) the uuid and paste it in appropriately for the new line for the /home partition (saved in /dev/sda10).

Write fstab out (":wq") and quit vi and

mount -a

to bring the /home partition in and check your fstab. (Make sure you ls -la /home to be sure you didn't mistake the old /var partition for the old /home partition.)

Now, "useradd" with the "-u" option for the old user-ids and "--home" option appropriately for assigning the old home directories that are now in place.

yum install gpm

for using the mouse in a virtual console. Very handy, especially the right-click trick, to save you from typos.

yum groupinstall "X Window System"

yum groupinstall "Xfce"

[Update 30 Dec.: Had to take a break and go shopping at this point last night.]

and, lo, and behold,

systemctl start graphical.target

starts your XFCE desktop.

ls -l /etc/systemd/system/default.target 

ls -l /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target

to make sure you see what you are doing.

rm /etc/systemd/system/default.target

(Use sudo if you are being smart and are logged in as a non-root member of the wheel group.) Link the one in /lib in where you just removed the old link to multi-user. (Why was that the obsolete run-level-3 on mine?) Don't get the order wrong, or you'll cause yourself a world of hurt. (I wonder if there is a gui tool for this to protect you from when you fall asleep at the keyboard.)

ln -s /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target \ /etc/systemd/system/default.target 

(One line is fine, in which case you don't need the "\". And notice the difference between /lib and /etc and which one the symbolic link you are replacing is under.)

And, now that I have done that, I have to go wading through all the cool tools I had installed and bring them back in, one by one, starting with Firefox and fbreader and gcc and hexedit and lazarus and ....

(No, wait, lazarus is down the road a bit.)

[Update 31 Dec.:]
Oh. I want to leave a note to myself, from a post on the fedora user list archives.

When moving stuff, like moving the /var directory from the new OS to the /var partition from the old OS, mounted temporarily on /mnt, rsync seems to be your friend:

rsync -avxHSAX /var/* /mnt

diff -r /var /mnt 

• -a => archive
• -v => verbose
• -x => don't cross file system boundaries
• -H => preserve hard links
• -S => do sparse files efficiently
• -A => preserve ACLs
• -X => preserve extended attributes

and that seems (as shown by the recursive diff) to handle the file links better than

cp -a

• -a => archive or same as -dR --preserve=all

Theoretically, this is what I want to do when cloning or backing up a drive.

More stuff to play with study in my spare time that I never have.

(Mustn't forget to umount the partition before mkfs and, oh, best to boot from a live USB or CD so the OS isn't playing around and writing in the drive one is trying to copy as one tries to copy it. And such things.)

And one more thing. fixfiles -fF relabel is best not to do directly.

touch .autorelabel

and reboot, instead.