sansbury
September 2nd, 2010, 08:53 PM
Hi and thanks in advance.
Let's say I have a system built and running in exactly the basic configuration I want, with my recompiled kernel, extra packages, special drivers, everything works, life is good.
What I want to do is take this exact setup and create an image I can copy onto a bootable USB stick. Is there a way to essentially take the contents of my hard drive and copy that onto a USB stick and then boot directly from that?
The use case behind this is that I am building an embedded system of which I may have hundreds of boxes with identical hardware and software configurations. Instead of hard drives, I am going to use USB sticks for cost efficiency and maintenance. My idea is that when it's time to upgrade, I could just image a hundred new sticks and go out and swap them.
My issue is that a standard LiveCD install gets me maybe 25% of the way to a finished system. I need to recompile the kernel for realtime support with my CPU, add some fidgety drivers for some specific hardware, and install a whole bunch of additional packages. I suppose I could create a makefile(s) to replicate all the manual steps of the buildout but that seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity IF I can just image that running system as it is.
Let's say I have a system built and running in exactly the basic configuration I want, with my recompiled kernel, extra packages, special drivers, everything works, life is good.
What I want to do is take this exact setup and create an image I can copy onto a bootable USB stick. Is there a way to essentially take the contents of my hard drive and copy that onto a USB stick and then boot directly from that?
The use case behind this is that I am building an embedded system of which I may have hundreds of boxes with identical hardware and software configurations. Instead of hard drives, I am going to use USB sticks for cost efficiency and maintenance. My idea is that when it's time to upgrade, I could just image a hundred new sticks and go out and swap them.
My issue is that a standard LiveCD install gets me maybe 25% of the way to a finished system. I need to recompile the kernel for realtime support with my CPU, add some fidgety drivers for some specific hardware, and install a whole bunch of additional packages. I suppose I could create a makefile(s) to replicate all the manual steps of the buildout but that seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity IF I can just image that running system as it is.