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Integrate Linux Portable distros to U-BOOT

usb portable linux

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#26 antonino61

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Posted 11 February 2021 - 09:07 PM

so what shall I do? compress the whole portable folder? or one by one? and what then? I normally call them uncompressed from the portableapps.com start executable. but in this case I dont mind lz4'ing them all or it all



#27 alacran

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Posted 11 February 2021 - 09:18 PM

All the folder, you can use WOF_Compress by wimb to do it, in fact each file is independently compressed when we use LZX compression.

 

You can find a link for it on my signature.

 

just remember: If you copy it to another drive it will be copied un-compressed and you will need to compress it again in the new location, or capture the folder with wimlib-clc to have a backup and when needed just apply it using LZX compression with wimlib-clc to a previously created folder with same or different name on the new location.

 

EDIT: To run the portables I use Pstart, it has an option to make a menu from a folder (including on it all *.exe files), that I can latter edit to my preferences.

 

alacran



#28 antonino61

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Posted 11 February 2021 - 09:22 PM

Alacrán, all my drives are lzx compacted, even more than wof_compressed. 



#29 alacran

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Posted 11 February 2021 - 09:28 PM

Then that's all you can do, for now there is no better option.

 

alacran


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#30 antonino61

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Posted 11 February 2021 - 09:35 PM

ok



#31 alacran

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Posted 12 February 2021 - 11:32 AM

About booting Porteus from a VHD: it do not work.

 

 

To comment a little more about this:

 

My first intent was made trying to boot a VHD located on my HD, using this approach as I found an old post from Jan/2015 here: https://forum.porteu...623d462c#p30786

 

But it didn't work with v5RC2, it seems there has been many changes on Proteus since 2015,

 

After this test is when I started trying to make it boot from a folder on the root of a partition, and when it was fully extracted into a folder, it started booting but didn't find the required files after first stage of the boot, then after some tests I found the best way to make it boot, is extracting first only proteus folder from the ISO to the root of a partition, and after this extract into the just created proteus folder, the boot folder from the ISO, with this new approach it worked flawlessly, then it was just a matter of eliminate all unnecessary files/folders to reduce the used espace to the bare minimum.

 

In fact (working on Windows) the partition format can be FAT-32 or NTFS, but as I only had available for my tests an old Kingston 4 GB USB stick and wanted to boot with persistence on MBR and UEFI all the 3 flavors of Puppy and also Porteus, I decided to make a single FAT-32 partition on it using USB_FORMAT by wimb

 

alacran


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#32 alacran

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Posted 12 February 2021 - 01:34 PM

After running some tests trying to find the best way to deal with several changes-xxxx.xzm (useful to keep our prefered settings if we frecuently boot to more than one PC), I found we can use this options to load them:

  1. Change the file name to our desired name and put it on optional folder.
  2. Keep the name and create a new folder with our prefered name into optional folder and put it into this new folder.
  3. Keep the name and create a new folder with our prefered name into porteus folder and put it into this new folder.

Respective cheat codes to use, assuming we also have LibreOffice module into optional folder:

  1. load=PC-1;LibreOffice
  2. load=LibreOffice;PC-1/changes
  3. load=LibreOffice  extramod=/porteus/PC-1/changes

NOTE: In this sample I used PC-1 name.

 

As the first option (No. 1) seems the more convenient to me, I modified the menu_distro.lst and grub_distro.cfg to work using the option No. 1 on this post, and now both have options to boot from PC-1 and PC-2, (Change the file name to PC-1 and/or PC-2 name and put it into optional folder) valid to keep the settings to boot from 2 different PC(s).

 

Of course it is nessesary to boot first with the fist option (Generic) on the menu/config file, make the settings to fit our preferences and create the respective changes-xxxx.xzm, if using default option it will be created on our physical drive (where is located porteus) into modules folder, and latter we can move it from modules folder to optional folder, and rename it as PC-1 or PC-2 to make it work on next boot.

 

For your convenience I attached to this post a zip file with the new versions of menu_distro.lst and grub_distro.cfg for U-BOOT, also included the folder For MBR grub4dos only, and a README.txt file with instructions.

 

NOTE: Change PC-1 and/or PC-2 with your desired name if you want, (the file name and also on the menu/config files attached)

 

Hope they can be useful for some of you.

 

alacran

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#33 antonino61

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Posted 12 February 2021 - 01:50 PM

thanx Alacrán, I will try my best options out and let u know asap.



#34 alacran

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Posted 17 February 2021 - 04:13 PM

JFYI

 

From first Post:

Previous procedure:

  1. Make a USB device with USB_FORMAT + addon-agFM and selecting Super UEFI
  2. I recommend the FAT-32 partition U-BOOT should be 8 GB min. to have space for all the following + your WinPE.iso(s)

Procedure for Porteus:

  1. Mount the Porteus-CINNAMON-v5.0rc2-x86_64.iso on Win10 or using imdisk or open it with 7-zip and copy/extract only the porteus folder to the root of the USB device, never delete the porteus-v5.0-x86_64.cfg file or it will not boot.
  2. Open the porteus folder located on the root of the USB device and copy/extract into it, the boot folder from the ISO. In fact the very minimum required is only boot\syslinux\initrd.xz and boot\syslinux\vmlinuz

alacran

 

After running a few more experiments with Porteus v5RC2, I found after extracting the portesus folder to the root of a partition/drive, the only additional files required initrd.xz and vmlinuz, can be extracted (from boot\syslinux folder on the ISO) directly to the root of the new porteus folder, and they will work also fine from this location, and Porteus will boot very fine this way too, then in conclusion the procedure will be:

 

Procedure for Porteus:

  1. Mount the Porteus-CINNAMON-v5.0rc2-x86_64.iso on Win10 or using imdisk or open it with 7-zip and copy/extract only the porteus folder to the root of the USB device, never delete the porteus-v5.0-x86_64.cfg file or it will not boot.
  2. Open the porteus folder located on the root of the USB device and copy/extract into it, only initrd.xz and vmlinuz files, from boot\syslinux folder on the ISO.

 

With this new approach, if we exclude/delete the boot folder and all of the remaining files/folders into it, the saving is avoid writting 2 folders containing 25 files or a total of 1.03 MB (1,088,323 bytes), additionally our menu/config files will use a shorter path to find and load/boot both files.  Attached New_approach_menus.zip file containing the respective menu/config files for this approach.

 

alacran

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