Mageia forum

While I know the iso images are dual-purpose and will boot from either DVD or from USB, this is not what I want.

I want to install Mageia 4 64 bit on a thumb drive, so that my target system will boot from the thumb drive and run off of the thumb drive...not a "live" distro, but a distro I can reconfigure as needed.

Will the Mageia installer do this and give a bootable USB device?

I know how to configure OpenSUSE this way - and it is a nuisance to do - but I need a modern distro to do some testing on a headless system, and a live distro won't work because I have to configure it my way. I'll use Mageia 4 if I can do so conveniently.

I have made a kde Mga 4 -64 bootable usb system by using the live cd.
It asks if you want to keeep un-used drivers, so my usb had to be greater than 4G.
a larger usb would also allow extra [ non live system ] programs to be added, eg: libre office

You can simply install to the thumb drive instead of your hdd, also write the bootloader to the MBR of the thumb drive. Works just fine here.
No need to use the live images for that, I've used the Free DVD image.

doktor5000 wrote:No need to use the live images for that, I've used the Free DVD image.

If you're installing on one system and running it on another then the Live install is better keeping unused hardware drivers.
Another problem that has reappeared is missing partitions, perhaps only in Cauldron as I haven't tried with Mageia4.
If you install on a system with a swap partition it will not boot properly on any other system.
I don't know if Windows partitions with are detected during the install and given /etc/fstab entries would cause problems as I have no such partitions.

I tried to install using the full DVD and the installer, from a virtual machine. I forgot how slow a USB stick is to write. Installation ran for a full day, then appeared to hang. I then realized that this installer was attempting to do a full install on an 8 GB USB stick. I concluded that the stick was full, so I rebooted the VM into the live DVD and installed from that.

This worked. I made some config changes so it would work in my intended target environment and it is now running.

BTW...there is a bug in the serial console handler. Using minicom as my terminal program, and a USB/serial adapter and null-modem adapter to get to the target (this combination works for me on many different targets/OS environments), then when I get the login prompt from mageia, I type a character and get a newline as well. This restricts me to a one character username and a one character password

I did, however, get ssh running, and it works properly so I can ssh into the target to do my work.