showeq on a usb pen?

[e@tme]

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone has investigated the possibilities of running seq on a usb pen drive with something like knoppix or feather?

Anyone think that this is possible/feasible/worthwhile? :)

[purple]

Possible? Sure. Feasible? Sure, why not. Worthwhile? Maybe I guess.

Someone around here talked about rolling a showeq/knoppix CD awhile ago, so people can just boot up and go and not have to deal with actually learning much about Linux. I don't know how far that got or if anyone really cared enough to do anything with it.

[uRit1u2CBBA=]

I don't think anyone wanted to buy into the idea of releasing updates to it, as often as it does.

[e@tme]

updates - thats the only real concern,as it will need someones time and ownership - much like patches and updates and package building is reliant upon the current folks.

As a unix sys admin, im not afraid of *nix, just wondered if anyone had thought of this. Agreed, it kind of makes use of seq more verbose - aka plug and play so to speak, but for me, i do not have to dedicate a peice of hardware solely for seq (currently swap hdd out of laptop and insert fc3 hdd)

heh in retrospect, i spose i already have a hotswap linux distro really :p

anyways, back to san migratoins lol.

[Cryonic]

guess no one has ever just dual booted a system then...
Given the size of drives today, it isn't hard to sacrifice 5GB or so to install a full normal distro to a system to boot into for using SEQ, then back to windows for other stuff...

[gruntsters]

Thats my machine setup. Dual boot, works easily. I threw in a spare hard drive, installed FC3 on it, and there I am.

[CeleSEQ]

I think the main issue would be the distribution problem. It wouldn't be too hard to make a knoppix type cd or a pendrive image, but it would most likely be 200M or so at the smallest, and given the frequency of updates, that's a lot of bandwidth to push out... people would have to download the whole thing each patch. If distribution was only by torrent, it might be feasible, but then you run into some other issues, like the fact that anyone in a torrent swarm can see other IPs in the swarm (people value their privacy a lot on seq matters).

If SEQ moved to a system where network code and offsets were retrieved from the net at run time, it would make a bit more sense, but as it stands, I think it would be more work than it is worth (unless of course someone has a lot of bandwidth they want to dedicate to this.) Even then... probably easier just to dual-boot.

[Cryonic]

would still mean seeding 200MB for each torrent... So the minimum time to get the new version out would be based on the upload rate of the seed.

[LordCrush]

In the last issuse of the CT Magazin in Germany is a copy of VM Workstation 4.5 with a key for 1 year ... SEQ works good in a VM

[Freakyuno]

I can dedicate bandwidth to this if someone wants to build the "live cd / usb" drive. I have 30 Mb/s up and down available with no quota's.

[Tor K'tal]

Isn't there an issues with USB Pen/Jump/Flash Drive being bootable by the BIOS?

Otherwise, aren't you just trying to do a cygwin setup and store all the data on the Pen Drive?

I did some digging to see if I could boot my PS2 from a Jump Drive and ran into that whole driver issue. There was some discussion that you could use one to save games if the game itself had the drivers built into it but not if it didn't, which made total sense to me.

If you've got a link on how to make a Pen/Jump Drive bootable, I'm very interested in reading it (would save me a ton of work at work, having writable space instead of just what is on a CD).

~ TK
:edit: spelling fix (probably missed a few)

[Freakyuno]

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050909/

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5735

Google's your best friend.

[Tor K'tal]

Thanks for the links Freakyuno, they were very informative.

Unfortunately I'm stopped at the USB device bootability in the BIOS, which is the major milestone I think putting Linux+ShowEQ on a flash/pen/jump drive would be.

Of course, if you have a system that allows for booting from the USB drive, I think it could be done fairly easily on a 512MB or 1GB drive.

~ TK

[Cryonic]

but if you have a MB that new, then you could probably just dual boot or run Linux/SEQ in a Virtual environment. And then you wouldn't have the speed issues of reading/writing to the flash drive.

[Circles]

with the size of modern USB drives, even thumb drives are up to 8gb max.

more than enough to run a full blown install + SEQ, without issues.

now to fit it into the far more common 1gb flash drive, well, thats some work at least to figure out dependancies, but installs and updates can be done on the pen, while the CD would have to be re-released.

using something like Damn Small Linux as a base, I could see getting SEQ under 500mb easy, including source so you can update and rebuild.

the sticking point with thumb drives has always been getting the damned things bootable in the first place... I dont have floppy drives to rip boot images from!

[uRit1u2CBBA=]

If it could be possible to have the executable downloaded from some server or server pool off of a CD or thumb drive image, then the whole ISO wouldn't have to be redownloaded and redone every time there's an update.

Not sure how easy something like that would be, but it's an idea.

[Cryonic]

Better idea might be to leave the distribution of the code as is, but move the configs to be downloadable for opcode only changes (e.g. no struct changes, just data got moved around on the wire).

[Freakyuno]

Doesnt Gentoo using the genkernel support a "Live CD" type of installation, where it can do Hardware Plug and Play? Can set it up to hot and coldplug stuff on boot. You can also keep it very small doing your own compiles. I dont know enough about it to do a whole build, but sounds like it might work well.

[Fluxcapacitor]

Boot Knoppix, or whatever bootable distro you want from CD then run SEQ from USB drive? Would be a zero footprint solution. You would ony have to update SEQ seperately on the USB drive.

[gruntsters]

With the Knoppix + USB Pen idea, would you have to install SEQ every time that you ran it ? Or would you somehow "install" SEQ on the pen after booting with Knoppix ? Sounds pretty interesting.

[SeqTester]

I have many years under my belt with Linux but 94% of that has been ShowEQ related (5%VDR) so if this makes no sence then just say so and I will go back to lurking the threads...

I have 2 ideas on this...

1st
What about Boot on CD but use either small partition on local HDD or USB-Key to store the actuall compiled files, maps..ect. Script it to grab CVS check if yours is "Current" and then go on to execute ShowEQ.

2nd
Being everyone using this will have the same EXACT install of linux have the compiled files downloaded after boot. I am not sure on the bandwidth on this if you only needed the files that got updated since that CD was released.

Just a few Ideas, I like the fact ShowEQ is hard to install keeps most of the people we don't want using if from using it. I like this more for portability reasons if you need to go someplace and can not bring 2 machines to play EQ on.