Using same USB drive with multiple computers.

James Wilkinson fedora at aprilcottage.co.uk
Mon Dec 11 13:26:33 UTC 2006


monty19@ hotmail.com wrote:
> I have Fedora installed on a USB drive and use it with a laptop. It
> works very well, but what I would like to be able to do is plug it
> into a desktop or another laptop and be able to use the same install,
> without having to completely reconfiguer the system each time I move
> it. I am wondering if there are any programs out there to save the
> system configurations for multiple hardware configurations. I tried
> doing some google searches but did not come up with anything, was
> wondering if anyone here knew about anything?

It sounds like you've already done the hard work. You might want to add
OHCI and UHCI modules to your initrd, so you can boot (slowly) on USB1.1
computers. You might also want to switch to booting by volume UUID:
instead of defining your boot device as
LABEL=/
you'd define it as
UUID=3e6be9de-8139-11d1-9106-a43f08d823a6
You should also change mounts in /etc/fstab.

This should make life easier if you boot on computers that already have
Linux filesystems installed. (Fedora can get very confused if it sees
two partitions with the same label). You can find which partition has
which UUID by running
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Beyond that, once you're up and loaded, Fedora is very good and getting
better at reconfiguring itself. It's increasingly using hotplug code to
rediscover its hardware at each boot anyway. So you may well find that
you don't need to do anything, or just need to handle a few problems.

You'll probably find NetworkManager a much better option than the
traditional network scripts.

If you must install proprietary drivers, make sure that they're properly
packaged.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail:     james@ | "This thing is bigger than the both of us!"
aprilcottage.co.uk | "Oh Tom! It's ... it's an elephant!"




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