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

["David Lord" <netbsd%lordynet.org@localhost>]

On 6 Apr 2014 at 4:12, Chris Bannister wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 05, 2014 at 09:24:31AM -0000, David Lord wrote:
> > 
> > My attempts at an install system from a usb stick
> > eventually worked well and was useful on my systems
> > without cdrom drive. Unfortunately I managed to 
> > overwrite it. There were two downsides to my usb
> > stick, although on a 16 G stick I only had about 
> > 500 MB of space with install system taking up most
> > of that, secondly it was painfully slow.
> > 
> > I've just now reinstalled the stick with 5 GB used
> > for the filesystem:
> > 
> > Filesystem   Size  Used  Avail
> > root_device  4.9G  443M   4.2G
> 
> Can it be extended to use the whole 16G? That could be handy as a
> transportable Live system.

Hi

No problem, I intended adding a couple of extra fdisk
partitions.


> > It needs some cleaning up but it boots ok.
> > 
> > I also have NetBSD-6.1_STABLE-i386-live-sd0root.img.gz
> > built from sysbuild, that can be transferred using 'dd'.
> 
> And this can be dd'd to a USB stick as a bootable live system? Is it
> possible to extend the image to use all the space on the USB stick?

I've not found an option to set the image size but dummy
files could be added to the iso directory and then once
the image is dd'd to the usb stick it should be possible 
to delete the dummy files to create some free space. 

Having played with the usb stick for a while, I'd say 
its use would be limited to doing system updates since
writes to the stick are very very slow.


I've also tried mklivecd which has an iso directory the
contents of which can be changed before generation of the
iso file. I've not yet burnt a cd to test it.


David

> 
> -- 
> "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
> who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the 
> oppressing." --- Malcolm X