I've recently created LiveUSB sticks from the Gentoo LiveDVD and LiveCD. (I'm trying to put Gentoo on an OQO.) It was pretty easy -- I was able to use ext3 even -- and I thought I'd share how I did that with everyone.
The three steps are: . Format the stick. . Put the Gentoo stuff on there. . Slap on the boot loader and configure it. Prepare The Stick ----------------- For the DVD, you need a big stick -- for the CD, not so much. Let's say the stick is at `/dev/sda`. Using fdisk, create one partition on it, marking it bootable. (That part is explained all over the place.) When that is over, run mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 and then put the master boot record on the device: cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sda Copy The Gentoo Material ------------------------ Mount the ISO of your choice -- say it's at `/media/iso` -- along with `/dev/sda1` at `/media/usb`. All you have to do is: cp -pPR /media/iso/* /media/usb Setup The Bootloader -------------------- This is where my process differs from the tutorials for Gentoo. I lifted the idea from the Pentoo distribution (now defunct). You install the `extlinux` loader _to the directory_ where the bootable stuff -- so it's okay to leave it all in isolinux. cd /media cp usb/isolinux/isolinux.cfg usb/isolinux/extlinux.conf extlinux -i usb/isolinux There will be a `extlinux.sys` file in there along side the configuration file after you install. That's it. I wanted to go with ext3 so I could have links and a large filesystem -- FAT16 won't take more than 2GB -- and I'm glad this was so easy with Gentoo 2007.0! It's too bad the tutorials out there don't make it clear the progress that has been made in the last year. USB booting is great -- I will likely exploit the ease of 'remastering' my image to good effect when installing on my OQO -- and I hope this email helps others out there who are interested in the topic. -- _jsn -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list