FredPod 101218 – Normal Linux on a Pen Drive

FredPod Program 101218

This is FredPod, a podcast about creativity and technology from the Fredericksburg, Virginia area

This podcast is available in MP3 format via iTunes and at marwalk.podomatic.com. You also can get this podcast in the open source Ogg Vorbis format; look for the Ogg Vorbis RSS link on the home page at marwalk.net.

FredPod is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

This is your host, Mark Walker.
Show notes for this podcast are available at marwalk.wordpress.com, under the category Podcast.

This program was produced on December 18th, 2010. And today’s topics will include:
Recent releases on SourceForge.

Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora Linux project.

The Latest from FredLUG.

Today’s feature is my experiment placing a “normal” linux installation on a 4 GB flash drive.

And we’ll close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
Katy Wehr entitled “Blessing of the Kindling.”
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FredPod by Mark Caldwell Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Here are some projects with recent releases on SourceForge (links are in the shownotes):

Web Cable Manager—Simple web based cabling system manager. Room/racks/patch panel and devices are managed in a simple test base web interface.
http://cablemanager.sourceforge.net

gpsbook—GPSBook is a software dedicated to manage display and manipulate GPS traces.
http://gpsbook-team.blogspot.com/

SkypeTab—This program adds tabs to Skype for Linux
http://skypetab.keks-n.net

Q Binary Clock—Q Binary Clock is a platform independent simple binary clock widget. Q Binary Clock was initially started as “Binary Clock” or just “binaryclock” for Fremantle. The source code is available at their website noted in the shownotes: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/binaryclock
http://qbinaryclock.sourceforge.net

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Here are some recently updated items in yum at the Fedora project:

Name : claws-mail
Description : Claws Mail is an email client (and news reader), based on GTK+, featuring quick response, graceful and sophisticated interface, easy configuration, intuitive operation, abundant features, extensibility

Name : goldendict
Description : Goldendict is a feature-rich dictionary lookup program. The latest release has the following features: Use of WebKit for an accurate articles’ representation; Support of multiple dictionary file formats; Support MediaWiki-based sites to perform search; Scan pop-up functionality.

Name : ibus
Description : IBus means Intelligent Input Bus. It is an input framework for Linux.

Name : k4dirstat
Description : KDirStat (KDE Directory Statistics) is a utility program that sums up disk usage for directory trees – very much like the Unix ‘du’ command. It can also help you clean up used space. K4DirStat is the port to KDE4.

Name : luci
Description : Luci is a web-based high availability administration application built on the TurboGears 2 framework.

Name : selinux-policy-doc
Description : SELinux policy documentation package

Name : thunderbird-lightning
Description : Lightning brings the Sunbird calendar to the popular email client, Mozilla Thunderbird. Since it’s an extension, Lightning is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing it to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks.

Name : xmp
Description : The Extended Module Player, known as XMP, is a modplayer for Unix-like systems that plays over 80 mainstream and obscure module formats from Amiga, Atari, Acorn, Apple IIgs and PC, including Protracker (MOD), Scream Tracker 3 (S3M), Fast Tracker II (XM) and Impulse Tracker (IT) files.

Name : xulrunner “zool-runner”
Description : XULRunner provides the XUL, or zool, Runtime environment for Gecko applications.
[ I see this package show up often in yum updates. ]
Here’s a little further background on this from Wikipedia: the XML User Interface Language, is an XML user interface markup language developed by the Mozilla project. XUL operates in Mozilla cross-platform applications such as Firefox and Flock. The Mozilla Gecko layout engine provides an implementation of XUL used in the Firefox browser.

You can find additional information on these, and many other recently updated packages, by typing yum info recent at the command line.

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You can find the Fredericksburg Linux Users Group email list at http://calypso.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/fredlug. Feel free to join the list.
Besides the FredLUG email list, you’re also welcome on the IRC channel pound FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.

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Feature

Today’s feature is my experiment placing a “normal” linux installation on a 4 GB flash drive. This is different from the Live CD versions in popular distros that can be updated only through a persistence layer or persistence overlay. Persistence overlays are a nice feature of bootable USB sticks, and they’re great as far as they go. However, they also have limitations that counteract the gains made from persistence.

For example, a persistence overlay does not take advantage of all of the possible space on a flash drive. The size of the overlay must be set at the creation of the USB installation. Also, once the overlay is filled up, it can be reset with a kernel boot option, but all data in it is lost. Furthermore, all updates to the device, not just your data, go into the persistent overlay. This includes package updates, and configuration changes.

The more restricting thing with Live USB sticks is the inability to access the content of the persistent overlay when the device is connected as just a data drive to another running OS. For example, save a file such as mycontent.txt to the device when its onboard OS is booted, and that file will not be accessible after the onboard OS is shut down. Plug in the device as a data drive on another OS, and the mycontent.txt file is nowhere to be found. It’s there alright; just buried and inaccessible inside a wrapper that can be opened normally only by the OS on the Live USB stick.

This features does have its advantages. It sure provides a layer, pardon the pun, of security. And if the onboard system name and other settings were default, then it also would provide a degree of anonymity for network access and private web browsing. In those situations, Live USB is exactly what you want.

So if what you really need is a normal computer on a pen drive, let’s look at some alternatives.

You could always do a normal install with a distro slimmed down by design, such as Puppy Linux or Tiny Core Linux. Chances are if that’s what you needed, you’d be doing that already.

But what if you wanted on your pen drive something more mainstream; something you could keep updated with a familiar tool such as yum or
apt-get? What if you wanted to install linux on a thumb drive that would be logically the same as a regular installation?

That’s exactly what I wanted to try, and here’s how I did it: I used the Fedora 14 i386 install DVD; not the Live CD. I connected the 4 GB USB flash drive to the install machine and booted to the DVD. When the install menu got to the selection of target media, I had to select use the entire disk. Naturally when you do this, you need to be absolutely sure you’re not installing to any hard drives on the machine; I know you knew that, but it’s just an obligatory admonition.

The only install choice that would work for the 4 GB target drive was the last one, which is named “minimal.” The install process proceeded as normal after that. And when it was done and the system rebooted into the USB drive, I got a beautiful black screen of run level 3 command line goodness.

Only the root user is defined at this point, so I logged in as root. You have to any way as there’s some more work to do. For one thing, the minimal installation has no ready wireless capability, so a wired ethernet connection is essential. And I had to reconfigure the eth0 interface each time I booted until I could get Network Manager installed and running. The eth0 configuration can be done the hard way or the easy way.

The hard way is to ifconfig set the IP and netmask, then set the default gateway route, then identify one or more DNS name servers in the /etc/resolv [ without the letter e at the end of resolv ] dot conf file.

The easy way to get networking going is to ifconfig set the IP and netmask, then let dhclient do the gateway and DNS settings. In the beginning you still have to set up the eth0 interface after each reboot, so I just wrote a short script to run the easy way commands whenever I needed to.

Now the fun part, that being updating and getting a destop installed. With a good wired Internet connection I immediately did a yum upgrade—I like to add the –skip-broken option to keep any misconfigured packages from stopping the entire upgrade. Lots of packages to be updated, especially soon after a new release. Unlike with the persistent overlay installations, this update replaced updated files of the same name in their place, instead of taking up precious overlay space with the changes.

Just to be sure I got all the updates, I did a yum clean all, and then a yum makecache. That’s makecache singular, which is different from the Debian style apt-cache gencaches, which is plural. Then I ran yum upgrade again to ensure the system had the latest in the repositories.

As things went along, I frequently did a df disk free check to ensure I wasn’t filling up the 4 GB capacity too fast. The root directory held in there around just over 50% of it’s space. In the end I had about 600 MB of free space after getting a normal gnome desktop working. That’s with the boot partition and the logical volume group that are part of a normal Fedora installation.

But getting there’s half the fun, so back to the set up. There are three more things needed to get a full GUI interface. Those are the Xserver, desktop, and display manager. With the Internet connection functional, these can all be yum installed.

To get X installed with the least amount of typing needed, you enter at your root prompt yum install xorg-x11-* and let it go. This will install a lot of packages, many of which are not needed. That’s okay, even with a 4 GB drive, there’s still enough headroom for this.

To be sure, do a df and check the free space each time. If it’s getting too full, just run
yum erase \*devel\* to remove the development packages; that is unless you’re planning on doing development on your USB booted system. You may or may not need to escape the wildcards with the back slashes.

Next for the desktop. For the GNOME desktop, run
yum install gnome-desktop* and this will install the needed dependencies for the desktop with it.

Now for the display manager. I installed the GDM, as in GNOME Display Manager. To do this, run
yum install gdm* and this will install the packages required for that display manager.

I also ran yum install gnome-session* as this provides management features for the GNOME desktop or GDM login session. It also starts up the other core GNOME components and handles logout and saving the session.

Now to test the GUI. Entering startx at the command line lauched the GNOME desktop. Excellent. A ctrl-alt-backspace kills X. Again, excellent. Entering init 5 at the command line lauched the GNOME desktop again, but I couldn’t go back to the command line from there. That is, except to reboot; and as the inittab was still set to default to run level 3, I had an escape route to basic confguration—if you get stuck in run level 5, it might be a little tricky to do other needed configuration tasks, especiall if you can’t get to a terminal window or any reason.

When comfortable with the configuration, and you can reliably get to a terminal from the desktop, it would be safe to edit inittab to default to run level 5. However, there might be an advantage to leaving the default at the run level 3 command line. Those advantages might include ability to run on very old or otherwise slow hardware, and the additional security of initially having fewer processes and/or network services running.

Now with GNOME installed, I installed Network Manager, by running
yum install NetworkManager. That provided Network Manager functions for the wired ethernet interface, but still no wireless.

So off to find a driver for the wireless adapter in the laptop I was installing to. It turned out that it was Broadcom model that inclued “b43” in its driver name. Putting yum to work again, I ran
yum provides \*b43\* and found the package to install. Again, you may or may not need to escape the wildcards with the back slashes. It might help to pipe that through grep fwwf to list just the firmware related results. Then yum install the driver package—in this case it was a version of b43-openfwwf. After a reboot, you should see a wlan0 interface available. It will take some additional tweaking to get it working, but that’s not unique to a USB booted system.

Large apps, such as OpenOffice.org are not going to be practical for 4 GB. But go to 8 or 16 GB, and more things naturally are possible. The cost of USB drives is dropping to the point that 32 GB thumbdrives are not that expensive anymore. There also there are lighter weight editors that can read open document files; or utilities that convert open document files to text or other simpler format.

When you’re done, you can put your pen drive in your pocket, and update or upgrade it anytime you want to.

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As it’s winter here in the northern hemisphere, today’s podcast will close with “Blessing of the Kindling;” a Creative Commons licensed work by
Katy Wehr, the name is spelled k-a-t-y w-e-h-r, from music.mevio.com.
This song has what some broadcast DJs call a false ending about 2 and a half minutes into the piece. So be sure not to miss the instrumental part at the end.

Stay warm, and Enjoy.

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What’s In Your Head?

Related to the “what” question, is the “how much” question.

But let us address the “what” question first. In the Gospels, Jesus asked people not so much what they thought of him but who they thought he was. I used to wonder why that mattered; after all, whether something exists, or someone is who they are, is external to what anyone thinks in their human capacity. If something exists and I don’t believe it to be so, then I’m simply wrong. But what we think is important, however, as what we think matters *insomuch as it affects us.* Jesus did not and does not need our approval, or even that we believe him; he, as our Creator, does not need the approval or belief of the created thing.

How does one know then what to think? I think that all the churn and concern on some atheist forums is just so much irrelevant noise. The reason can be summed up as in this passage of the Gospel of Matthew:

12:38 Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from you.

12:39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:

12:40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

12:41 The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, one greater than Jonas is here.

12:42 The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, one greater than Solomon is here.

Looking for a sign, translate that as proof, as a prerequisite of believing makes perfect sense when dealing with other humans. Humans require positive identification as part of establishing contracts with one another as proof of their agreements; the purpose of these is to use as testimony against the other in the case of default. Effectually, such proof is required as a counterbalance against the untrustworthiness of other humans; and righty so!

In that context, the proof that humans demand of Jesus is not possible. The limitation is not that of Jesus; it is human limitation that will never allow the human need for proof to be met. No debate with or among believers or atheists will ever be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. So such discussion is pointless for everyone.

Here’s why. We as humans don’t have the capacity for comprehending the “what” in this area. The reason is we cannot accommodate the “how much” dimension. It’s not going to happen. Consider this other passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

9:16 No man puts a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up takes from the garment, and the tear is made worse.

9:17 Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runs out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

There are a number of analogies to illustrate this concept, and address the “how much” question. You don’t put gasoline in a diesel engine, or diesel in a gasoline engine. You don’t play a DVD in a CD-only player. You don’t converse with someone who doesn’t share a common language with you. In computer programing, you don’t assign a floating point value to an integer variable. You get the idea; insert here the analogy that is most meaningful to *you.*

It’s not only the type that prevents us from mentally grasping it; it’s also the amount or degree. You don’t tow a locomotive with a lawn mower, but that’s exactly what those who “would see a sign” are demanding be done; and that it be done by they themselves! Pardon the cliché, but that will happen when pigs fly; which will be never, by design of the Almighty! If Jesus exchanged “the kingdom of heaven is like” for “the kingdom of heaven is,” (pardon another cliché) our “heads would explode.”

So what’s the most practical thing for people of all persuasions to do. I say leave the subject alone. Do not concern yourself with what someone else thinks or feels inside. As long as they treat others fairly, that’s as much as one can ask of another human; but we should indeed demand that much of ourselves and others. Consider how much more valuable time would be spent in schools if the curriculum were devoted to learning languages and practical sciences; that instead of making schools a doctrinal and ideological battleground.

And have a Merry Christmas. I can say that on my own blog; I’m a Christian. God bless.

Is it all God’s doing? Just asking.

No matter what your cultural/ideological/doctrinal perspective, there’s plenty to confound what would be the perfect order. Let’s look at some of the frustrating situations, and then examine what might possibly be going on.

The state of being aggrieved about something is effectively universal. Here’s a list of a few of the grievances:

• If you’re an economic conservative, you see an unjust effort to redistribute wealth to those who don’t deserve it.
• If you’re an economic progressive, you see an unjust imbalance of privilege and power, and a system fixed to keep it that way and even increase it.
• If you’re a social conservative, you see increasingly pervasive sexual immorality in all media and culture, topped off with more unborn babies being murdered every day.
• If you’re a social progressive, you see a cruel narrow-mindedness and deep seated suspicion of the “other;” this is especially manifested in the genuine hostility toward people who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT).
• If you’re a believer in American exceptionalism, it’s baffling beyond reason how so many people cannot see the need for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; although certainly not perfect, the USA is a net force for good in the world. WikiLeaks enrages you; these people just don’t get it about the damage they’re doing to this net force for good!
• If you’re one who believes that the net effect of American exceptionalism is not for good, WikiLeaks is an essential force in exposing unsavory acts and intentions; the emperor has been disrobed, and it’s not a pretty sight.
• If you’re part of the mainline political establishment, you’re annoyed by the fringe efforts to influence otherwise sound policy; these include Tea Partiers to the Republicans and Greens to the Democrats.
• If you’re a part of those non-mainline movements, you’re skeptical that anything will change with this perennial business as usual approach by those in power. To conservatives, that means big unions and entrenched liberals. To progressives, that means unmitigated influence of greedy moneyed interests; the faces change but the corruption remains undisturbed.
• If you’re a conservative, you don’t understand why people don’t see that the way to create jobs and get the economy moving again is to remove onerous tax burdens and regulations from businesses.
• If you’re a progressive, you don’t understand why people don’t see the feudal oppression of the worldwide corporate oligarchy.
• If you’re concerned that national security is in peril, the monitoring of all communications and scanning of people at airports are essential and reasonable measures.
• If you’re concerned that civil liberties are in peril, the surveillance society we’re becoming is an ominous development.
• (etc, etc.)

Are you depressed yet?

Is it possible that all these things are happening for a reason? Let me be quick to say that I don’t know. All the things mentioned above are real. The economic downturn is real. The wars are real. Abortion and hate toward LGBT people are real. WikiLeaks and the response to it are real. Terrorists and surveillance measures are real.

Is it possible that God is making things impossible for the middle class for a reason? Does he want us to morph from the consumerist society that we are to a cooperative society where money is not the sole means of wealth?

Those changes may indeed come about, mostly out of necessity. If wages and other income are insufficient to provide a living, then life will carry on by other means.

But that won’t change anything at the fundamental human level. Evil people will develop ways to game the cooperative system, just as they have the current financial one. There will still be deceit, stealing, and injustice. The reason is the state of the human heart.

Consider this passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

13:27 So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? from whence then has it tares?

13:28 He said unto them, An enemy has done this. The servants said unto him, Do you want then that we go and gather them up?

13:29 But he said, No; lest while you gather up the tares, you root up also the wheat with them.

13:30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather you together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

You know where this piece is going. Jesus is the sole answer to any and all evil, everywhere and anytime. And Jesus can enter the hearts of those corporate oligarchs just as much as he can those welfare fraudsters—there’s some wheat among those tares. We’d best get to praying.