On Mon, 28 Feb 2011, Don Schmadel wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have been using a particular configuration of Linux that has attracted
the attention of many of my colleagues who are sworn windows users. My
computer consists of a small pocket-size 500 GB USB hard drive. The
drive contains 4 partitions:
/boot
swap (encrypted)
/ (encrypted)
/home/ (encrypted)
I can plug it into virtually any 64 machine and it boots up with my system.
At home I plug it into my laptop. At the lab I plug it into a University
desktop.
There remains only 2 issues to be addressed:
1) The drive is USB 3 but only works in USB 2 sockets.
When I plug it into a USB 3 socket, the machine sees the boot directory
with the initrd and kernel, but after loading, it swithches to the USB 2
looking for the remaining partitions. Odd.
Boot loader (GRUB) accesses USB devices through the BIOS, while after
loading it goes through the kernel by direct hardware access to the USB
controller (bypassing BIOS). Kernel may be missing USB 3 drivers.
What version of the kernel do you have? Since USB 3 is still new...
2) NVDIA proprietary drivers have to be incorporated in such a way that
they don't conflict with the other available video drivers. This almost
works.
Same challenge as having NVIDIA drivers on a Live CD would have. I can
think of some solutions to this.
Completing this project I believe to be important because of the
potential impact on the use of computers in general:
1) When assembling a new computer one doesn't have to load an operating
system. Once the hardware is assembled the system's immediately ready to go.
2) It easy to carry around a small USB drive instead of a laptop. If
this were to become universal, one might not have to carry around a
laptop any more.
It's kind of like carrying your own pack of 5 1/4" disks between Apple II
machines :D
3) One only needs an inexpensive system to backup the drive.
Anyone interested in helping with the remaining issues?
-Don
--
Don Schmadel, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
Department of Physics
Physics Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
301-405-6141
