Booting from your USB/Pen/Thumb Drive

I just read a post from Joe (I guess he is a manager at SUN - if so, a good one to support the developers :-)) mentioning about the visual media coverage of Anil Gulecha's and Moinak Ghosh's achievement of booting live Solaris from USB. Watch the video below

In this light, I thought of mentioning a few USB bootable live CDs in linux and mention a few links also, mainly for my own future reference. Linux is the only OS, I know atleast a bit of, even I am playing with OpenSolaris, not yet as an admin. Is there a hosting based GUI control panel available for OpenSolaris ? I could find only Zomos (though the site says only v9 is supported, but both arch SPARC and x86). If there is a good and "non-technical user" friendly one, I bet OpenSolaris is gonna compete with Linux in hosting industry in next few years.

PenDriveLinux This is one good discussion site and the Live Linux I would recommend is Slax So here goes a few URLs,

Boot Knoppix from USB
Knoppix Remastering toolkit FAQ can be read here
BootUSB from debian Wiki
Googling for a HOWTO boot from USB can fetch you this link

I missed FOSS.in for the last years

Yes that's true. Being a delegate there for last 2 days of the India's premium FOSS event conducted from Nov 24 - Nov 26th, I am now realizing what I missed in the last few years. Chances of meeting FOSS's who's who. Oh wait!!..for anyone who dont know what is FOSS it stands for "Free and Open Source Software". We had talks by Rasmus Lerdorf, founder of php (till v2), Tim Pritlove (all in all of Chaos Computer Club), Luke Kanies (man behind the PuPPeT) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org and the diamond sponsor of FOSS.in). On the eve of 25th, there was also a interesting panel discussion by the India's who's who of FOSS where, Karunakar (The linux localite), Kishore Bhargava (The Technological Evangelist), Atul Chitnis (one and only toolz), Frederick Noronha (Foss media guy), Arun Sharma (The FreeBSD India) , Sirtaj Singh Kang (wah taj!!, the KDE India Inc.) and K.Dakshinamurthy. And the great job of moderation was done by Sudhakar Thaths Chandra (Thaths). Talk on past and future 10 years of linux in India was so interesting and in the question session, (which was stopped by IISc guys) the pioneers of FOSS movement in India gave tit for tat replies for all of us, who speaks a lot, and works a bit in spreading FOSS.

The most lively hall was of a MNC who are pioneers in technology, but lacks the marketing. The enthusiasm I could see in each and every person in SUN's hall in spreading the knowledge and the work. The real FOSS activists :-). I missed their BoF's :-(. I believe the entire BOSUG team was there. Most of them know what they are doing. Sanjeeva, Shivakumar, Sheshadri all were of great help in explaining the concepts. I was more interested in hearing about details on ZFS. And yeah I registered to BOSUG list. Anil Gulecha, who is a third year computer science student at JSS Academy, Bangalore and the person who put a live bootable Belenix into a thumbdrive, delivered excellent talk on booting Belenix (Ingeniously Indian!!) from USB and explaining the bootup calls like livecd, liveUSB and why they prefer USB to CD and so on. Unfortunately, I couldn't bootup the liveCD they provided. Need to spend some time on it, or have to get the laptop to next BOSUG Meet. BTW AFAIK Belenix is the first OpenSolaris distribution to be able to run from a USB drive and it supports profiling too :-) They say it gets you the desktop in 60-90 sec which is awesome.

I am a guy who have been using Linux for some time, about 6 years, and if I remember right, I first installed linux RH 7.1 after 6 months when I first touched a computer. Believe it didnt fascinate me much. I installed Linux on a 2Gb partition of 20Gb disk and the 64MB RAM, and linux GUI (XF86 ??) was damn slow and I couldn't do anything there which resulted in formatting the disk space. It was only after a few months later, I learned about multiple virtual terminals at Ctrl + Alt + F1 --> F7 and from that point, I switched to Linux. I loved the b/w screen and could get HCF modem work there in linux, fixed a few issues of other's HD's where HD was not at all detected in windows and at one point or the other, I completely switched to linux unknowingly.

I believe it's the time I play with OpenSolaris and explore the latest technologies. I will surely attend the next BOSUG. I will go back to Cochin and talk with Bejoy Sir more on that. He and Prajeev Sir are my inspirations. They are the known best in Solaris, both SCNA :-) I need to read a lot about dtrace and ZFS. I will explain about them, as I understand in this blog at a latter point. Long live FOSS.IN.

NB: Next blog is the questions of OpenSolaris Quiz conducted at FOSS.in 2006 and my answers to it, as I think.

Meanwhile visit foss.in and view the snaps at,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/foss.in
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fossin
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/fossin2006