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In this post we talk about how to install Puppy Linux to portable hard drive from Linux, with GRUB as the Boot Loader.

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Introduction

Puppy Linux is a lightweight but full featured Linux distribution which focuses on ease of use. It can boot into a RAM disk, that is to say, the entire system can be run from RAM. So Puppy is able to run extremely fast: all applications start in the blink of an eye and respond to user input instantly. Puppy has the ability to boot from an internal hard disk drive, a live USB, a live CD, an SD card, and so on. Installing Puppy into a removable device makes it possible that we bring Linux and our personal settings with us to quick boot everywhere, as long as the computer supports USB boot.

In this article we show how to install Puppy Linux to a USB portable hard disk. All operations will be done under Linux. Actually, as is said on its Official Website, Puppy is easy to use and does not require a hard disk. The role of our portable hard disk is just a container of Puppy files and our personal data. After Puppy starts, the whole system will run in Memory. The “installation” is very simple. All we need to do is, 1) download the latest ISO image, 2) unpack or mount it to the file system and 3) copy the unpacked files into your USB hard disk.

After that, we have to make our device bootable by setting up a proper Boot Loader on it. It’s recommended to use GNU GRUB. GRUB is a powerful and flexible multiboot boot loader from the GNU Project. Most of Linux distributions use it as their default boot loader. We will install it to our USB hard disk and configure it to boot Puppy. Below we will explain the details step by step.

Get Puppy Ready

We can download the latest Puppy Linux at here. At present, the latest version is lupu-525.iso. Mount this ISO file on your file system, e.g. puppy-tmp under your home directory:

mount -o loop lupu-525.iso /home/yuliang/puppy-tmp/

Note that in this post, all operations should be done by root user.

Next, copy all the files on the ISO image to the target drive:

cp -r /home/yuliang/puppy-tmp /media/diskone/lupu-525

The labels of your partitions may be different. In my case, I have four primary partitions on my USB disk, namely, diskone, disktwo, FAT32 and NTFS. The first two are formatted with ext3 file system. The above command will put puppy into diskone. You can change the directory name lupu-525 to be any name you like, of course.

Taking advantage of GRUB, a logical partition will work too, and it will be okay if you choose to format your partition as some other file system such as FAT.

Installation and Configuration of GRUB

The next step is to install GRUB on the USB disk so that we can boot Puppy anywhere. As is described on Wikipedia, the boot process using GRUB can be divided into two main stages: stage 1 and stage 2. Stage 1 will be stored in the MBR of our hard disk. It’s job is just to load the next stage of GRUB. Before stage 2 is loaded, stage 1 may have to load a specific stage 1.5 which contains the drivers needed to access the file system. Stage 2 will then load the default configuration file and any other modules needed.

Assume that the portable drive we use is the second hard drive in our system, namely sdb in Linux. In GRUB, it will be named (hd1) instead(the first disk is named (hd0)). The first partition on (hd1) will be (hd1,0), and (hd1,1) is the second, and so on. From the above we can see that Puppy’s directory lupu-525 is stored in (hd1,0). We will put GRUB’s stage files and configuration files into (hd1,0) too.

Installation

There exist two ways to install GRUB onto a disk: 1) Using the grub-install script; 2) Using GRUB interactive shell. Below we explain respectively.

1. Using the grub-install Script

To install GRUB onto (hd1,0)(diskone in my case), type the following command:

grub-install --boot-directory=/media/diskone/ /dev/sdb

This will install the GRUB files into directory /media/diskone/boot/grub, and the configuration file will locate there.

2. Using GRUB Interactive Shell

GRUB provides a bash-like command line interface. This interface can be seen by pressing ‘c’ key on the graphical interface at the start of our computer. Here we will take advantage of an emulator of GRUB’s command shell.

First, we can copy the existing GRUB files in our Linux system to our portable disk:

cp -r /boot/grub /media/diskone/

Then, we will install stage 1 to the MBR of our disk. Type grub after the Linux command prompt. In the GRUB shell popped up, command:

grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)
grub> quit

This will install the GRUB files into directory /media/diskone/grub. Also the configuration file will be there.

Configuration

The default configuration file of GRUB in openSUSE or Debian/ubuntu will be menu.lst in the grub directory. But in Gentoo or Redhat/CentOS/Fedora, it will be grub.conf instead.

That means, if you install GRUB from Fedora and don’t have a grub.conf, GRUB will not able to find the default configuration file, so it will just take you into the command line interface when it start. I encountered this problem after I reinstall GRUB stage 1 from Fedora without changing menu.lst generated by Debian’s grub program to grub.conf. In practice, it’s recommended that you have both the two files. One of them could be a symbolic link of the other.

Here we provide a simple configuration file that could be used to boot Puppy we just installed. You can use it directly by putting it into your grub directory, or add the kernel list to your own configuration file.

### Simple Configuration File to Boot Puppy
 
### DEFAULT OPTIONS
default		0
timeout		3
 
### KERNELS LIST
title Puppy Linux 525
kernel /lupu-525/vmlinuz ramdisk_size=256000 pmedia=usbflash psubdir=lupu-525
initrd /lupu-525/initrd.gz

You may want to install multiple Puppy Linux in your portable disk, e.g. an English version and a Chinese version. This can be pretty simple using the GRUB we just installed. Just put Puppy files in different directories, then add proper kernel list into the above configuration file, and we’re done. Enjoy it!

The END.

© 2011, Yuliang Jin. All rights reserved.
This post is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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