livecds in the future

[John Reiser]

On 11/24/2009 01:38 PM, Peter Jones wrote:
> On 11/24/2009 04:25 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:

>> Mandriva Flash - Mandriva's commercial system-on-a-USB-stick thingy -
>> does exactly what you confidently proclaim to be impossible. It comes
>> with a CD ISO you can burn onto a CD (or mini-CD) that allows you to
>> 'chain-boot' the Flash on systems with crappy BIOSes that can't boot
>> from a USB stick (yes, they exist, but are getting progressively rarer,
>> obviously).

> I don't suppose you can easily fish out a url for the source to this?  I'd like
> to see what they're actually doing.

I've done it using Fedora 12, on an old Dell i686 laptop whose BIOS
cannot boot USB.  A typical GRUB stanza has a line such as:
   kernel /vmlinuz ro root=live:label='Feodra 12 i386 DVD' rootfstype=auto ...
where /vmlinuz is the kernel on the CD, and root=live:label='...'
designates the label of the device for the root (and init, and ...),
which can be USB, DVD, another CD, any block device that the Linux kernel
/vmlinuz can enumerate and understand.

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