>>> Well, no, what i really want is a portable Debian, so i can, for >>> example, build a web app and show it everywhere without need a web >>> server.... and just have my own configuration and run it every where > Some "live" distributions have "USB environments" (I call them) which allow > you to create a bootable image complete with a good-sized /home/ space for > data on a USB thumb drive. An example is Knoppix > (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/), which has a utility just for that > purpose. Knoppix is basically Debian; it is binary compatible. It uses the > LXDE environment, which is KDE 3, but with GTK instead of Qt.
The problem with most (all?) of them is that they're based on the idea of a read-only partition plus a separate partition that will hold the changes. In many cases, this is perfectly fine, but I hate re-installing so I want to be able to keep updating my "Debian Live" via "aptitude upgrade" for the foreseeable future (say 10 years). Luckily it's not that hard to make such a "partable Debian". The only possible problems I can think of: - disk size (when I first tried mine, I only had a 128MB USB disk at hand, and the one I use right now is 512MB but with some space kept for a FAT partition used when I use that disk as a "floppy"). In my case I solved the problem by using a compressing filesystem, which made things more complex because the only one I could find was jffs2 which doesn't work on plain block devices. If you have 1GB or more of space, this is a non-issue. - getting your BIOS find your kernel: - some machines can't boot from USB at all. - others can, but with some restrictions (typically Apple hardware, so I end up having to setup my flash key with grub-efi-32, grub-efi-64, and grub-pc, which is poorly supported under Debian). - of course yet other machines aren't even using the IA32 instruction set, so you may need several separate installs (PowerPC/Mips/Arm/...). - getting your kernel to find the root filesystem. Your external hard disk partition will typically not have a fixed device name like /dev/sdb2, so you'll want to refer to it with its UUID, label, or via LVM naming. - Some udev rules try to give unique and *stable* names to devices by simply remembering the names they used in the past. On a system that you move around on many different machines, this can be a pain in the rear, since your only ethernet card may easily end up named eth7 (because eth0-eth6 were already used for the cards on other machines). So you may want to "rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-*" in your /etc/rc.local. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/jwvljeua2x4.fsf-monnier+gmane.linux.debian.u...@gnu.org