Re: Making a localized, educational live-usb version of Netbsd? Possible, and is worth it?

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20140401200429.GT20347%snowdrop.l8s.co.uk@localhost>,
David Laight  <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
>On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 01:38:30PM +0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
>> 
>> I would be interested in having an image that can be easily copied and
>> installed on a flash drive, ideally without repartitioning the drive,
>> so that the student can reuse their drive either as a live usb or a as
>> portable storage for their own private files.
>
>The bootxx_fat16 (and bootxx_fat12) can be placed in the first sector
>of a fat16 (or fat12) filesystem and will load /boot from that filesystem.
>(They both read the filesystem metadata - they don't rely on a list of
>sector numbers.)
>One /boot is loaded it can load a kernel from any fat filesystem.
>
>I've not tried to write a bootxx_fat32, I think it might be possible
>because I believe there is usually more than one sector available.

Heh, that would be nice to have.

>Unfortunately most modern USB sticks are large enough to be FAT32.
>
>On thing I did manage was to add a small mbr partition and FAT12
>filesystem in the space before the main partition.
>Setting this up was 'interesting'!
>NetBSD's fdisk will do it from command line parameters, but the linux
>one really won't let you.

In other news now you can use src/distrib/utils/embedded/mkimage to
create a usb image that contains an ffs filesystem that should be
bootable from any usb disk with ./mkimage -h amd64 -r sd

christos