D3D Live ISO

The D3D Thesis project aims to provide participants a Live ISO. This is an operating system that resides on a CD, DVD or USB stick that can run on all common computers, independent of the state of their computer's hard drives, thereby bypassing installation procedures for 3D printing related programs.

Links

• Porteus home page
• Wikipedia article on Porteus

Tobben's Notes While Developing ISO

Porteus uses modules, Slackware style. We want our ISO to have modules for

• Printrun (most importantly Pronterface)
• Slic3r
• Point-and-klick environment like KDE
• GNU IceCat Web browser (see Wikipedia article)

We need three separate ISOs:

• USB stick, 32-bit
• CD, 32-bit
• DVD, 32-bit

New ISO's are created within Portheus with script /mnt/sdXN/porteus/make_iso.sh.

Maybe useful:

save-changes - dump whole changes from the live session into a module

Wrote ISO to USB stick

sudo dd if=Porteus-KDE4-v3.1-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdc

Didn't work. Re-formatted USB stick, extracted contents of ISO file and put it on USB stick. Mounted USB-stick, copied Portheus files over there and ran the script

/media/torbjorn/Porteus/Porteus/boot/Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com

This produced a final message:

Installation finished successfully.
You may reboot your PC now and start using Porteus.
Please check the /boot/docs folder for additional information about
the installation process, Porteus requirements and booting parameters.
In case of making tweaks to the bootloader config,
please edit: /media/torbjorn/Porteus/Porteus/boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg file.

Didn't work. Made new ISO with following changes

• UEFI support
• 32-bit
• FAT32 filesystem on stick

That did work, but FAT32 prevented anything from being stored on USB stick while in Porteus. Changed to ext4. Worked fine.

Guide to package creation and manipulation at porteus.org

Created xzm package that allows Pronterface to be run from source. File:Pront-package-incomplete.xzm

Made changes to /boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg to tailor a boot-mode for D3D Workshops.

ISO images

Bundled a new ISO image from my own with /porteus/make_iso.sh: Porteus_with_Pronterface-i486_v1.iso. To use, extract it and look at the file File:USB INSTALLATION.txt, or at porteus home site.

Communications

Torbjorn: Configured a 32-bit (64-bit machines can also use it) Porteus Live OS ISO today, taking up 412 MiB space, but looks quite good (KDE4), runs very very fast, includes Pronterface source code and starts Pronterface on boot.

I'm on a slow connection, so iso will take another hour to upload...

See if you can get it to work. We can step through it at the meeting tomorrow. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/D3D_Live_ISO#ISO_images

Mac Work

Option/alt key gets us into boot screen.

Apple will try to hinder us in various ways, so we need to learn how to jump through some loops:

Ubuntu.com article

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx

States:

Most Macs with Intel processors will work with either 64-bit or Mac images. If the 64-bit image doesn't work, try the Mac image.

Their DVD instructions simply consist of burning the iso onto the DVD with Disk Utility.

Recommends CD instead of USB.

Converts iso to an .img or .dmg file before using Disk Destroyer to burn the image onto the USB.

Makeuseof.com article

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-boot-a-linux-live-usb-stick-on-your-mac/

Tested on 2011 Macbook pro.

Uses FAT32 ant master boot record partition.

Uses EFI boot.

Uses iso images that are somehow customized for mac.

support.apple.com article

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201663

Says we need GUID partition

rEFInd article

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Explains difference between boot manager and boot loader.

Says this about (U)EFI

Prior to mid-2011, few computers outside of Intel-based Macs used EFI; but starting in 2011, computer manufacturers began adopting UEFI in droves, so most computers bought since then use EFI.

Randomtutor article

http://randomtutor.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/installing-ubuntu-on-retina-macbook-pro_19.html

Uses Ubuntu USB for Mac OS X article mentioned above with 64-bit Mac iso image.

Installs and uses the rEFInd boot manager:

cd ~/Downloads/refind-bin-0.7.7  
./install.sh --alldrivers

NOTE: If you have Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) installed, then the rEFInd installation needs to be handled differently. See [1].

Porteus Forum Thread 1

http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=4177

Says that Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com script installs a boot loader.

rEFInd Forum Thread 1

https://sourceforge.net/p/refind/discussion/general/thread/b9c7cefa/

Suggests we should try rEFInd and Porteus with EFI boot first. Note that Roderick W. Smith is the rEFInd dev himself.