my poor man's install setup

[probono]

Just wondering what you want to do though ? Just package a loopback rootfs and move it around and you have your desktop with you all the time. Put that on a portable USB 2.0 disk enclosure.

A very good suggestion, in fact I wonder why "big" distros (such as SuSE) don't offer their installation this way. Add in on-the-fly hardware detection... and there we go. As long as I can mount the loopback rootfs read-only, which is a quite important aspect for me.

[garyng]

Just wondering what you want to do though ? Just package a loopback rootfs and move it around and you have your desktop with you all the time. Put that on a portable USB 2.0 disk enclosure.

A very good suggestion, in fact I wonder why "big" distros (such as SuSE) don't offer their installation this way. Add in on-the-fly hardware detection... and there we go. As long as I can mount the loopback rootfs read-only, which is a quite important aspect for me.

I have a script sitting somewhere which can be dropped into any standard debian setup(rootfs) which will make it run with mounting RO. I did that last year when I was toying this debian with me anywhere.

BTW, the booting from NTFS has been solved too. The was what I did last year :

1. carry a portable 2.5" USB disk wich is just FAT with my kernel, initrd and rootfs plus the w32grub I wrote

2. On any WIN32 machine, I just run w32grub to install grub there which can be launched from boot.ini(thus no change to its boot sequence)

3. copy over my stuff to a temp directory(either NTFS or FAT32 is fine)

4. reboot the machine and choose grub which allows me to boot into my desktop right away. everything I want is there.

5. when I want to go, just goes back to XP and wipe the temp directory and the boot.ini entry(well that can be left there).

A variant of this for those paranoid, use encrypted looopback driver so you can encrypt the whole rootfs and enter the password when linux boot up. This way, no one will be able to even peek into your things, even they take the HD to NSA(I assume).