I have downloaded the 7.2 iso and tested it on my laptop -- it looks good. I want to install it to a removable sd card, since the solid state hard drive on this laptop is very small.

1) I want to keep booting from the grub and menu.lst that are already on sda, and install antiX to sdb, which is the card. I can't remember from previous installs of 7.01 on other laptops whether the install scripts will give me that option.

(I realize that I could if necessary re-install grub on sda, but that means extra work and a small chance of messing it up.)

2) Alternatively, I could put the iso on sdb and then add the boot from iso option to sda -- I've done that before. But it seems as if booting from iso doesn't allow any personalization -- it's always like booting from CD the first time. Is that right?

Thanks for any help. Thanks in generral for antiX -- it runs beautifully on my other laptop, a slow Sharp MM-20.

cc

I have never installed antiX to a removable sd card, but this is what should happen.

1. The installer should give you the choice to install on sdb and install grub to MBR (you don't want this I suppose), root or nowhere. If you don't install to MBR then you'll need to edit your original grub/menu on sda.

2. You are right. It will just run as a livecd, and after each session you lose any changes made.

Hope it works out for you.

cconly - welcome to the antiX forums. __{{emoticon}}__

You can install antiX to sdb if you like, and then when it comes to the Grub option, choose to install grub to"Root" rather than MBR. That way, it'll get written to the root of /sdb. Then you can go in by hand, extract the parts you need from the grub menu.lst in /dev/sdb/boot/grub and paste into your original menu.lst. Very simple & works for me everytime.

Good. That's what I hoped -- I'll install grub to /boot on sdb, then edit the menu.lst on sda.

I'll report how it goes. Many thanks.

cc

Well, I tried. Installing to the sd card was no problem. gparted said it was able to format it as ext3, and the install went normally. No problem modifying the existing menu.lst either, copying from the one set up in /boot/grub on sdb.

But actual booting never worked -- even though all the information about file locations was correct, grub kept giving an error called"Bad file or directory type" which the Grub manual says results if the reference is to a symbolic link or directory. I made sure the menu.lst entry referenced the file proper, not a link, but got the same error.

Then I made the card itself bootable and installed grub to it. That worked fine (the laptop allows you to boot from sd and usb drives), but grub on the card's mbr still couldn't find an acceptable vmlinuz to boot from.

I've tried to find information about file structures of usb drives and haven't had much luck, but I begin to think there is something different about them install did not pick up on and that I was not describing correctly. I notice that when I look at the card in Xandros, which is on the laptop now, there is something called"partition1" that gparted did not seem to see. (But inserting that into the startup string in menu.lst didn't help.)

Anyway, I reformatted the sd card as vfat and have gone back to running antiX on it as fromiso, and that works perfectly, but with the usual limitations.

If anyone has any suggestions about sd cards I'd be happy to hear them. Thanks.

cc

Sorry to hear that it didn't work. Is your laptop one of the eeePC varieties (Is it Asus?). Just wondering, because i know there are several distros exclusively built (compiled, put together etc) for the eeePC, which suggests to me that there may be certain differences between them and a"Standard" or"Vanilla" PC/Laptop. I don't know what those differences are, but i have been watching (& taking part in ) a thread on the Ubuntu forums where someone is doing a similar thing on an eeePC, and while he could get Ubuntu working and installing to some degree, there was a problem with installing to (& booting from) external cards. External devices seemed to work OK (USB HD etc) but cards seem to cause problems.

I know there are some eeePC forums out there so maybe (if you haven't done so already) take a look there & see if they can throw some light on it at all?

I'm glad that you at least got antiX running though, even if it was from iso. If i hear anything that may help in the coming weeks, i'll be sure to post it here, and please post here if you find a solution to this problem.

Thanks, Djinn.

Yes, this laptop is an eee pc. The xandros linux that it comes with works well but also takes up all the available main drive space, which is why I want to install antiX to a card; and yes, there are some definite hardware peculiarities on the eee pc.

I'm familiar with the eee pc forums and the special linux versions people have come up with for it.

But I like antiX -- I use it on my other laptop -- and in fact it runs very well on the eee pc. The main problem for all"foreign" linux installations on the eee pc is wifi support. The eee uses some version of the atheros chip and till now nowbody else recognizes it natively. Ndiswrapper ought to work, and people say madwifi does too, but it's hard to implement them when you're running"from iso" -- among other things, you can't block loading of the standard atheros modules in Mepis, and they keep nidswrapper from working (in my experience so far). Removing them doesn't seem to help.

Anyway, I intend to keep plugging away (pun intended).

Incidentally,the problem should solve itself with the next generation eee pc 900, which has a much bigger solid state disk (12 or 20 GB depending, compared to 4 GB on the 701) and should allow space for a normal install.

cc