Linux Red Hat on a big flash drive...

ok a question for all your linux chaps (and lasses) out there. Will I be able to install Red Hat 9 on a 8gig external flash drive....well this one in particular.

 

RH9? why? I tried years ago and never got any where. My advice is to check out http://www.slax.org/ its designed for that kind of thing.

 

It needs to be red hat for the software I want to install on to it.

 

Why RH9, why not use Fedora or CentOS? You can install Linux on a flash drive. Just make sure that you can boot from it. I would check on Google for some links...

Andy

 

I'll ask the guys at work to see if the program will run on Fedora. I can boot from an external drive with an option in my BIOS...and got a lightweight version of Linux working via a live boot up from the usb stick.

 

also...what's so bad about Red Hat anyway?

 

Its like a million kernels old

Seriously the world has moved on, better faster more productive...

some of the links here may help but remember RH is what 4-5 years old now some of this stuff may not be available.
http://blog.mypapit.net/2006/01/installing-grub-in-usb-flash-drive-2.html

 

ok, I kinda new to this Linux fandango

 

What software requires Red Hat? Surely using something like alien on Ubuntu or Debian can translate all the packages for you?

 

ok the app I'm trying to learn will run ok with Fedora.

So will Fedora install and boot up ok for a external USB drive? How big is the install?

 

Nothing is wrong with Red Hat. You have to remember that Red Hat now produce a stable version every 18months to 2 years apart called Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You have to pay for this (depending upon what you want, you can pay anything from £40(?) to £1,500) but they basically freeze every package on the distro and only supply security and bug fix updates. This means that the kernel version (say 2.6.9 for RHEL4) stays the same, but has bug fixes and security patches applied when required (for example, our RHEL4 ES box is at kernel version 2.6.9-55.0.9.ELsmp). This means that a corporation can say that their piece of software runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and tailor their package for the 2.6.9 or later kernel version.

CentOS is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux (ES or AS, I can't remember) without the Red Hat branding and is free. I use it at home on my laptop and WCG computer.

Fedora is the Red Hat sponsored free distribution. It was spawned out of Red Hat 9 and is considered to be a development environment for the packages that may go in the next Red Hat Enterprise Linux release.

I would actually say, for a business, the best route to go down is Red Hat (but then, I'm biased, I'm a RHCT) but if you want to try things out and learn on something that is a little more "windows like" choose Ubuntu. Personally, I don't like Ubuntu (never liked sudo) but many people swear by it.

As far as software requiring Red Hat goes, it is mainly (in my experience) the software vendor that says what OS their software is validated on. So, if a software vendor says that they only validate their software on Red Hat and you run it on, say Fedora or Ubuntu, you will be very lucky to get support from them if something goes wrong. There is nothing saying that you can't run a piece of software on any version of *nix, apart from the support policies that you get from the vendor (and that your IT department requires).

hope that helps.

Andy

 

excellent info...thanks. Do you know how big the Fedora installation is...will a 8gig drive be big enough?

 

It is as big as you want it to be. If you want all the bells and whistles it can weigh in at >4GB, but you can trim things down at the install stage to have less than 1GB used. E.g. if you don't need OpenOffice or gcc, don't install it. You could do away with the development libraries too, that'll save space. Have a read of the installation guides for more information.

Andy

 

8GiB should be plenty.

 

What software are you trying to run?
There must be packages for deb based file.
BTW don't forget mandriva is part of the readhat family aka uses rpm.

 

its some high end film grading software

 

It will work for a test but dont rely on a flash drive, especially for an OS, especially the cheap flash drives. They have a tendancy to die pretty quickly.

It usually has to do with the number of IOs but sometimes there's no real reason for it. The new ones are a lot better but I know that compact flash cards used to last about a day with XP and a paging file on them.

 

Just to give you guys an update on this. I went for Fedora 7 on a LaCie little disk. Insalled on no problems. Reboot and select fedora in the gub menu its starts to load up then gets to the next setup screen....license agreement, firewall...etc...then my mouse locks up and then my keyboard locks up...and the whole system hangs. Any ideas?

 

Are they USB? First thing that comes to mind is irq conflicts. Try disabling pnp os in the bios, its some thing like that depends on the version of your bios.

 

As Aplha said
Flash drives have a low number of read/writes before failure, some of the more clever ones have software that rotates the location of the read/write to make them last longer, also newer ones probably last longer but I wouldn't use one to install an OS on it.

How about a 2.5" external USB Hdisk?