I just wanted to post that I successfully installed antiX-M7.2-base to a usb stick. All I did was choose the correct partition of the usb stick (mine came up as sdb) and installed grub to the MBR in sdb with the intrd option enabled.
It took longer than a normal install, but when I rebooted, it worked!
I did a dist-upgrade, installed a couple of apps and rebooted and again all is well.

So now I have a usb stick with antiX-M7.2-base installed and another usb stick running as a livecd.

Portable Antix! This looks interesting. When you installed grub did it list all your installed OS's?

That sounds interesting--I am going to have to give that a try!

eriefisher wrote:Portable Antix! This looks interesting. When you installed grub did it list all your installed OS's?

Yes, but I didn't test to see if they boot.

This could be a distribution method for people that are able to boot from usb.

eriefisher wrote:This could be a distribution method for people that are able to boot from usb.

Absolutely!! Nice going anti - i'm going to give that a try later on to see how it goes. I personally feel that (For the forseeable future at least) USB is the way to go. CD's are cheap for sure, but in the long run, with the way that USB sticks are dropping in price, USB's are a great method of actually carrying around your"Distro on a Stick!".

The only thing that i'd like to find out though, is about the"Wear & Tear" on the stick through constant"Reading & Writing". Would something like that severely limit the life of a stick, or is it not really an issue?

Puppy Linux has somehow reduced read/write cycles to prolong the sticks. Not sure how they did it though.

eriefisher wrote:Puppy Linux has somehow reduced read/write cycles to prolong the sticks. Not sure how they did it though.

One thing is that you're supposed not to use a swapfile -- those writes add wear to the flash memory. (So they say: The eee pc forums have a lot of talk about this, since eee pc's have solid state disks.)

cc

OK, so you are saying to install antiX and the MBR to the usb stick, but you are not supposed to create a swap partition. Can you tell me how to do that? Do I just delete it after the install because I think swap is created automatically? Can I just reformat swap to some other format; will that remove it?

Thanks!

mariel77, if you choose custom install, you don't need to create a swap partition and set swap to none or existing.

anticapitalista

Many thanks for the tip re initrd, that had me stumped until I came across this thread, now running antiX off an SD card.

Is there a simple way to change the filesystem from Ext3 to Ext2? Thinking of reducing write cycles to the card, that's all.

Cheers.

Without re-installing, I don't think so.

You'll have to use gparted or cfdisk to set up the partitions before you install.

rayburn wrote:Is there a simple way to change the filesystem from Ext3 to Ext2? Thinking of reducing write cycles to the card, that's all.

Does ext2 reduce write cycles? Would it be better for an sd card or usb stick?

Here are some nice tips for flash disk use with Linux. My favorite is the
'-noatime' flag for 'mount'


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Katawin

I have managed to convert ext3 back to ext2 with the help of the following:

Converting from Ext3 back to Ext2

There may come a time when you want to convert back to Ext2. For directories other than the root directory or /usr, it's pretty easy. The following once again uses the example of /dev/hda10 mounted to directory /test:

* umount /dev/hda10
* tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hda10
* e2fsck /dev/hda10
* Edit /etc/fstab to change /dev/hda10 to mount type ext2
* mount /dev/hda10

The tune2fs command removes the journal inode, and the e2fsck command completes that removal.

Another way to do it is to use rsync, you would need either another card/flashdisk or temporary hard disk space, using the following:

rsync -avH mount_point/* other_mount_point/

Hope this is of interest.