[DONE] install M4 on USB without swap drive in fstab

[Erik]

This weekend I wasted a lot of time trying to install Mageia 4 on an USB stick in order to use it on many different computers.

Firstly the install takes ages, although e. g. Rosa fresh only takes less than an hour. The Rosa installation succeeded, but CPU use was erratic and much too high when doing nothing. So I returned to Mageia, the distribution I am most accustomed to.

Secondly the Mageia 4 installation when it was finished at last, did not boot on another computer, because the swap drive of the computer that I used to make the installation on the USB flash drive was incorporated in the fstab, the menu.lst and in 51-mageia-resume.conf. I corrected this by putting the uuid of the USB swap drive there, but still dracut gives an error and does not boot, because it cannot find the uuid of the swap drive on my computer on another computer. I do not know how to correct this more hidden error.

How do I avoid this problem and force the installation to only refer to the swap drive on the USB stick wherever a swap drive is mentioned?

It seems to me that something is fundamentally wrong. I read a lot of posts about dracut errors on the internet, but I found nothing that enabled me to solve the problem. I am not that technical to follow some advice.

Greetings,

Erik.

[doktor5000]

Please use the forum search, there were already some thread about UUIDs in the initrd - solution was usually to either manually replace them or to recreate the initrds via dracut.

[jiml8]

For a USB installation, your best choice is just to completely disable swap. Putting swap on the USB stick gives very slow writes and will impact the life of the USB stick, and putting it anyplace else locks the USB stick to the particular system, as you have seen.

Also, the very slow installation is probably due to the write speed of the USB stick. I installed Mageia on a PNY stick recently, and it took hours...even using the live DVD as the installation medium. This certainly was due to the USB device and not due to Mageia.

[Erik]

Thank you doktor5000 and jiml8 for your help.

I did search on the internet, but did not use the magical words, because only with the help of "recreate the initrds via dracut." I was able to find what I looked for.

I had an USB stick that went belly up, with a complete installation of Mageia 3 on it. with it I showed off a bit what a liinux installation can do. Then I tried Rosa fresh, but it behaved erratically acording to ksysguard. With Mageia 4 I got the problems mentioned.

I had not thought of the finite lifetime of USB flash, so now I understand the cause of my stick's failure.

The solution to these problems, I guess, might be to use Puppy Linux with a swparate USB stick that contains the files I want to use when I am away from my own computer.

Thanks and greetings,

Erik.

[doktor5000]

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [DONE], thanks

[Erik]

Dear Doktor5000,

I tried Precise Puppy and got a nice result. But the installation and uninstallation procedures are far from easy for someone addicted for eight years now to Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia. Nothing beats Mageia on a desktop or laptop.

Thanks and greetings.

Erik

[doktor5000]

I tried Precise Puppy and got a nice result. But the installation and uninstallation procedures are far from easy for someone addicted for eight years now to Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia.

Sorry but I fail to understand. Which uninstallation and installation procedures?

[Erik]

Dear doktor5000,

I have been spoilt by Mageia and its predecessors in the matter of installing and uninstalling. It is all made very easy with the repositories and the ease of use in Dolphin. In this version of Precise Puppy it turned out that "Pecise" refers to Precise Pangolin, whose repositories are out of date. I wanted to install Libreoffice, but the repositories offer version 3.5.7 and I want the newest version. I installed the first I found, a version with "gtk2" in the name. It installed easily, but it did not open my files correctly!!! So I wanted to uninstall it. Removal of the files is one by one only!!! So I removed the the installation file and began again. Then I tried the deb version from libreoffice.org. I could not find a way to install all deb-files at one go, but could only find a one by one installation. Reading on the internet I found a SFS-file with the newest LO version. That is heaven on Puppy-earth. But I could not find the Dutch language pack. The newest Firefox I installed by expanding the tar.gz file in usr/lib and changing the shortcut to seamonkey on the desktop accordingly. I wanted to remove seamonkey, but this program belongs to the installation, and I did not see immediately how to remove it, except by manually removing the directories directly from the the file system. I learned a lot these days.

I have got now more or less what I wanted, and I must say that my respect for the mageia control center and all the comfort of KDE grew immensely.

Greetings,

Erik.