[rollo21]

The vision: Boot DSL or puppy Linux from a 16G flash boot drive, load VMware player and run any one of my VMware images (e.g. dev win server 2003) using my Intel duo 2G/2G laptop.

Who's done it (add VMware player to Puppy or DSL) or who can?? and how?? I'd willingly pay for someone to help in Wellington NZ.. I can manage a few basic command lines but that's about it.

Why? a lean stable, quick booting Linux distro right off my flash drive for web/music and as required, I can load a VMware image of the various dev machines I need for work purposes e.g. windows server 2003 with some enterprise applications on it or other Linux distro.

[saikee]

This is probably too early to expect a Linux to run Vmware in a pen drive and able to run Windows 2000 server.

Pen drives are very slow and many Linux if installed will report error like "kernel panic not syncing".

Puppy and DSL (Mepis and Slax too) can be installed in a pen drive. You can put several of them together and boot them with Grub. Bigger full size distros are less successful in flash drives.

[rollo21]

Thanks for the reality check - I thought the flash drive might have been faster - well flash has much faster seek times but 2.5" HDD will do a faster read/write. So I think I will throw Ubuntu with VMware player on on the local HDD and run virtual windows as required.

[saikee]

Just got a 4Gb pen drive for GBP 20 or about US$40. Its reading speed is 12Mb/s and writing is 3.5Mb/s.

USB 2 speed is 480Mbit/s or 60Mb/s. Thus you have a better chance running Linux on a USB hard disk than a USB flash drive.

When interrogated by hdparm command the reading speeds reported in my PC are

Internal 500Gb Sata II =81.98Mb/s
External 500Gb Pata USB hard disk = 31.67Mb/s
External 4Gb USB flash drive = 15.74Mb/s

[ganeshan]

Fedora Core 6 with no GUI can be installed on 2GB and bigger pendrives. Slower than hard drives but work allright.

[jweier111]

Hey guys,

Ran accross your thread while looking for more info on another crazed project. Your pipe dream isn't far off, I've done somthing simalar to this befor a few months ago. However it was a little unstable, and nearly imposable to secure well enough for our purposes.

Like I said it was a few months ago (so I can’t really offer all the subtle nuances of the process off the top of my head) but in a nutshell here’s what we came up with.

This example uses Xubuntu which is a lightweight version of the Ubuntu distro. We used Xubuntu due to it’s size and availability of support (through Ubuntu). You should be able to find similar instructions for which ever flavor of GNULinux you prefer.

First you need a system with Xubuntu installed then install the player (plus any additional apps and lib’s you want to include). Instructions can be fond here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=65638.

Then you will need to “cook” a custom live cd from your current install. Instructions for that can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Li...ionFromScratch.

Finally you will need to install the custom live CD to the USB stick, instructions for this are here: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-instal...nux-on-usb-bar

This obviously isn’t an exact science; there are a lot of little edits, and changes that need to be sauced out along the way. The part where our system bogged down was setting up custom scripts for re-writing the network adapters specifics to the players original host config on boot. It tended to break on machines that used a different network card than the original system the cd was cooked from. Also we needed a way to stream line the process of mounting the location of the VM's which led to the question of "to partition or not to partition?". Ultimately this is the point where I shelved the project due more to my own inexperience with writing bash scripts than anything else. The solution I have been kicking around is to use a driver in the original host machine similar to that of Ghost 11 (Universal Packet Driver v2.0), provided PXE is on in the bios of the computer your trying to boot the stick on (I have no idea if this is even possible, let alone if it would work).

Not sure if that helps at all or not but figured it doesn’t hurt to share. Feel free to laugh at the silly noob

Thanks

[jweier111]

Hey guys,

Ran accross your thread while looking for more info on another crazed project. You pipe dream isn't far off, I've done somthing simalar to this befor a few months ago. However it was a little unstable, and nearly imposable to secure well enough for our purposes.

Like I said it was a few months ago (so I can’t really offer all the subtle nuances of the process off the top of my head) but in a nutshell here’s what we came up with.

This example uses Xubuntu which is a lightweight version of the Ubuntu distro. We used Xubuntu due to it’s size and availability of support (through Ubuntu). You should be able to find similar instructions for which ever flavor of GNULinux you prefer.

First you need a system with Xubuntu installed then install the player (plus any additional apps and lib’s you want to include). Instructions can be fond here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=65638.

Then you will need to “cook” a custom live cd from your current install. Instructions for that can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Li...ionFromScratch.

Finally you will need to install the custom live CD to the USB stick, instructions for this are here: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-instal...nux-on-usb-bar

This obviously isn’t an exact science; there are a lot of little edits, and changes that need to be sauced out along the way. The part where our system bogged down was setting up custom scripts for re-writing the network adapters specifics to the players player’s host config on boot. It tended to break on machines that used a different network card than the original system the cd was cooked from. Also we needed a way to stream line the process of mounting the location of the VM's which led to the question of "to partition or not to partition?". Ultimately this is the point where I shelved the project due more to my own inexperience with writing bash scripts than anything else. The solution I have been kicking around is to use a driver in the original host machine similar to that of Ghost 11, provided PXE is on in the bios of the computer your trying to boot the stick on (I have no idea if this is even possible, let alone if it would work).

Not sure if that helps at all or not but figured it doesn’t hurt to share. Feel free to laugh at the silly noob

Thanks

[mzucker007]

Say, doesn't Puppy run completely from RAM once booted? Then perhaps the speed of the USB read/write isn't an issue.

I think I'll try to install the VMware Player on my USB Puppy and see what happens.

[saikee]

mzucker007,

Go ahead and tell us the result. I am dying to hear how you manange to run a typical 3Gb size gurst system inside a Puppy host.