Debian on a 128MB USB flash drive

[Stefan Monnier]

I wanted a live Debian system on my USB key.
The Debian Live option is too static for my taste, I wanted a real live
system, upgradable via apt-get etc...

One option is to use a large enough USB drive and do a plain Debian install
on it. But my USB drive is only 128MB so it was not possible.

I saw someone on the web has done something like that using squashfs+unionfs
and so you can do apt-get update and then to store the resulting state back
on the drive, you do some kind of "commit".

I didn't want to go down that route, so instead I've used a "plain normal
Debian system", but using jffs2 as a file system, which has the advantage of
being compressed and writable.

The whole story can be found at

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/gnu-linux/debian-live-usb


-- Stefan

[Chris Lale]

Post by Stefan Monnier
I wanted a live Debian system on my USB key.
The Debian Live option is too static for my taste, I wanted a real live
system, upgradable via apt-get etc...
One option is to use a large enough USB drive and do a plain Debian install
on it. But my USB drive is only 128MB so it was not possible.
I saw someone on the web has done something like that using squashfs+unionfs
and so you can do apt-get update and then to store the resulting state back
on the drive, you do some kind of "commit".
I didn't want to go down that route, so instead I've used a "plain normal
Debian system", but using jffs2 as a file system, which has the advantage of
being compressed and writable.
The whole story can be found at
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~monnier/gnu-linux/debian-live-usb

Very interesting!

You say that you have problems with apt-get. Have you tried aptitude at
the command line? Does that have the same problems?

[Stefan Monnier]

You say that you have problems with apt-get. Have you tried aptitude at
the command line?

No. Googling for "jffs2 mmap apt" seemed to indicate that it's not specific
to apt-get, so I didn't even bother to try something else. Besides, I'm
used to apt-get and not to aptitude, so I actually deinstalled aptitude.


Stefan

[Guillermo Garron]

Post by Stefan Monnier
I wanted a live Debian system on my USB key.
The Debian Live option is too static for my taste, I wanted a real live
system, upgradable via apt-get etc...
One option is to use a large enough USB drive and do a plain Debian install
on it. But my USB drive is only 128MB so it was not possible.
I saw someone on the web has done something like that using squashfs+unionfs
and so you can do apt-get update and then to store the resulting state back
on the drive, you do some kind of "commit".
I didn't want to go down that route, so instead I've used a "plain normal
Debian system", but using jffs2 as a file system, which has the advantage of
being compressed and writable.

I know you said you want a plain Debian, but what about DSL ?

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

regards,
--
Guillermo Garron
"Linux IS user friendly... It's just selective about who its friends are."
(Using FC6, CentOS4.4 and Ubuntu 6.06)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/go2linux
http://www.go2linux.org

[Stefan Monnier]

Post by Guillermo Garron
I know you said you want a plain Debian, but what about DSL ?
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

My understanding is that DSL offers some things I don't need (like
a desktop; I'm mostly interestd in this system as a kind of rescue drive)
and fails to provide me with the ability to just update it with apt-get (I
don't intend to *ever* reinstall this USB system, instead I'll just keep
updating against testing, as I've done on all my other systems).

DSL looks pretty neat, but seemed too much based on a "LiveCD" mindset, so
I didn't investigate much further. Maybe it actually offers just what
I wanted.


Stefan

[Joe Hart]

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Post by Stefan Monnier

Post by Guillermo Garron
I know you said you want a plain Debian, but what about DSL ?
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

My understanding is that DSL offers some things I don't need (like
a desktop; I'm mostly interestd in this system as a kind of rescue drive)
and fails to provide me with the ability to just update it with apt-get (I
don't intend to *ever* reinstall this USB system, instead I'll just keep
updating against testing, as I've done on all my other systems).
DSL looks pretty neat, but seemed too much based on a "LiveCD" mindset, so
I didn't investigate much further. Maybe it actually offers just what
I wanted.

DSL is desktop based, but it is _very_ small. I installed it to a
celeron 600 w/ 64 MB ram and a 2.0 gig hard drive. It worked just fine.
I am pretty sure you can get it working from a flash drive, providing
of course that your BIOS lets you boot from it. Once it's installed it
is a Debian system, and you can apt-get remove any of the software you
don't want or need, including X.

Keep in mind that the standard DSL comes with a 2.4 kernel. If you want
a 2.6 kernel, you need the DSL-N.

Joe


- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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[Marty]

Post by Stefan Monnier
I wanted a live Debian system on my USB key.
The Debian Live option is too static for my taste, I wanted a real live
system, upgradable via apt-get etc...
One option is to use a large enough USB drive and do a plain Debian install
on it. But my USB drive is only 128MB so it was not possible.

I may be missing something, I don't understand the original problem.
From http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s05.html.en:

2.5. Memory and Disk Space Requirements

You must have at least 32MB of memory and 110MB of hard disk space.

That's a lot more than a few releases ago, but it still fits into your USB drive.