Distro hopping wihout hard drive or - Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - for Linux user.
by igadoter from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5H3XE)
We all know how to hop. This is little different. You need one working live system with web browser, and these commands: wget or curl, dd - the basic, optionally: tee, zcat, xzcat, bzcat, md5sum, sha256sum. And of course second usb pendrive. Live medium for distribution is usually provided in form of hybrid iso image file - which means it can be burned directly into DVD or dd'ed into usb pendrive. Without hard drive there is no room to keep downloaded image. This is resolved with direct dd of image from website say http://my-linux.org/my-linux.iso
Code:% wget -O - http://my-linu.org/my-linux.iso | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1Mhere 'wget -O -' means download to stdout, by the way it is default for curl. One more issue I witnessed was check sum verification. Here is my solution
Code:% mkfifo /tmp/csum
% wget -O - http://my-linu.org/my-linux.iso | tee /tmp/csum | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1M & (md5sum /tmp/csum > my-linux.iso.md5)but there is better solution https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6245276 My simple solution works - md5sum is being counted on a fly. It happens images are compressed. This is where we need one zcat, xzcat, bzcat. For gzipped compressed image we need to add one more pipe
Code:% wget -O - http://my-linu.org/my-linux.iso.gz | zcat | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1Mand put tee /tmp/csum in corresponding place - depending on which checksum for my-linux.iso,gz or my-linux.iso we want to calculate. Now story behind. My hadrware configuration are two 8 GB pendrives and one 2 GB pendrive. My basic live system is liveslak. I tried MX Linux, Knoppix 9.1, Knoppix 8.6.1, Liveslak - two different versions, Porteous, last but not least NomadBSD - live system on FreeBSD. At the end: happy hopping - don't brake your neck.
Code:% wget -O - http://my-linu.org/my-linux.iso | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1Mhere 'wget -O -' means download to stdout, by the way it is default for curl. One more issue I witnessed was check sum verification. Here is my solution
Code:% mkfifo /tmp/csum
% wget -O - http://my-linu.org/my-linux.iso | tee /tmp/csum | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1M & (md5sum /tmp/csum > my-linux.iso.md5)but there is better solution https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6245276 My simple solution works - md5sum is being counted on a fly. It happens images are compressed. This is where we need one zcat, xzcat, bzcat. For gzipped compressed image we need to add one more pipe
Code:% wget -O - http://my-linu.org/my-linux.iso.gz | zcat | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1Mand put tee /tmp/csum in corresponding place - depending on which checksum for my-linux.iso,gz or my-linux.iso we want to calculate. Now story behind. My hadrware configuration are two 8 GB pendrives and one 2 GB pendrive. My basic live system is liveslak. I tried MX Linux, Knoppix 9.1, Knoppix 8.6.1, Liveslak - two different versions, Porteous, last but not least NomadBSD - live system on FreeBSD. At the end: happy hopping - don't brake your neck.