Sunday, February 01, 2009
Running SLAX 6.0.9 on a 512MB USB drive
SLAX was top of the list on The LiveCD List (http://www.livecdlist.com/) site and the description shows that it has very minimum disk requirement, so I feel that I should give it a try.
Without further thinking, I decided to install SLAX on my wife's broken MP3 player (a BENQ joybee). After all, this device has 512MB and the maximum size requirement for SLAX is only 193MB.
Following the instructions on the SLAX official site (http://www.slax.org/), it is very easy to put the pre-packaged SLAX onto the device.
Here are the steps done from Windows PC (just a reminder to myself) -
After that, restart the PC, hit the (or whatever key to get into BIOS), and make sure the PC boots up from USB driver.
A nice boot-up screen shows up. And all I have to is to hit to boot into SLAX.
TA.DA!! === a standalone Linux PC is now running with KDE ===
The first thing I want is network connectivity. Although SLAX recognizes most of my network devices, I have to customize SLAX a little bit.
TA.DA!! === a connected Linux PC running from a 512MB USB ===
Now, I would like to be able to view Web pages in Asian languages (especially, Traditional Chinese & Japanese). For this, I searched and read many informative web pages, even download a few ISOs just to extract a few packages (see the bottoms for all links).
I still haven't fully understand how it works, but after adding following items, my SLAX is now capable of displaying Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
1. Downloaded glibc-i18n-2.7-noarch-17.tgz and converted it to LZM (using tgz2lzm). Because the USB drive has very limited space, I have to modified "tgz2lzm" so that it uses my harddisk (instead of the USB drive) as temporary storage.
The glibc-i18n-2.7-noarch-17.lzm is placed under /slax/base
2. Downloaded Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts. Here what I have put under /slax/modules. They are all *.mo and renamed to *.lzm.
TA.DA!! === a multilingual Linux PC ===
Still, I have a few things want to achieve, like be able to input Traditioanl Chinese & Japanese, be able to play music, and so on, but these will be my homewok for the next few weeks or so
Reference URLs (in no particular order):
Without further thinking, I decided to install SLAX on my wife's broken MP3 player (a BENQ joybee). After all, this device has 512MB and the maximum size requirement for SLAX is only 193MB.
Following the instructions on the SLAX official site (http://www.slax.org/), it is very easy to put the pre-packaged SLAX onto the device.
Here are the steps done from Windows PC (just a reminder to myself) -
- download the SLAX tarball (http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php?download=tar)
- clean up MP3
- untar SLAX tarball to root of MP3 player
- execute /boot/bootinst.bat to make MP3 player bootable (pay extra attention to make sure the script does work on the correct driver)
After that, restart the PC, hit the
A nice boot-up screen shows up. And all I have to is to hit
TA.DA!! === a standalone Linux PC is now running with KDE ===
The first thing I want is network connectivity. Although SLAX recognizes most of my network devices, I have to customize SLAX a little bit.
at work, I use wired ethernet and I have to manually create /etc/resolv.conf
at home, I use wireless network, and I have to do a few extra things,
From KDE mene, go to "Internet" and launch "Wireless LAN Manager" From "Settings", "Configuration Editor...", I set up "Network name" as well as configured "WEP encryption" key The Wireless LAN Manager has no problem finding my wireless router and showing me that my signal strength is very good, but, for some reason, it doesn't enable my wireless interface. I have to drop to command prompt and wrote up a script to bring up the interface. Here is my script:
#!/bin/sh
#
WIRELESS=eth2
ROUTER=192.168.0.1
IPADDRESS=192.168.0.200
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
#
# bring up wireless interface
ifconfig ${WIRELESS} up
#
# assign interface address manually
ifconfig ${WIRELESS} ${IPADDRESS} netmask ${NETMASK}
#
# add default route
route add default gw ${ROUTER}
#
#
ifconfig ${WIRELESS}
route
TA.DA!! === a connected Linux PC running from a 512MB USB ===
Now, I would like to be able to view Web pages in Asian languages (especially, Traditional Chinese & Japanese). For this, I searched and read many informative web pages, even download a few ISOs just to extract a few packages (see the bottoms for all links).
I still haven't fully understand how it works, but after adding following items, my SLAX is now capable of displaying Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
1. Downloaded glibc-i18n-2.7-noarch-17.tgz and converted it to LZM (using tgz2lzm). Because the USB drive has very limited space, I have to modified "tgz2lzm" so that it uses my harddisk (instead of the USB drive) as temporary storage.
root@slax:/root# diff `which tgz2lzm` ../../customize/root/bin/tgz2lzm
18c18,19
< tmpdir="/tmp/tgz2lzm$$"> TMP=${TMP:=/tmp}
> TMPDIR=${TMP}/tgz2lzm$$
The glibc-i18n-2.7-noarch-17.lzm is placed under /slax/base
2. Downloaded Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts. Here what I have put under /slax/modules. They are all *.mo and renamed to *.lzm.
fonts-korean-1.0.11-9.1.noarch.lzm (Korean font)
CJK_Display_Support_optimized_1_0-3.lzm
Taiwan_cht_input_method_gcin_1172.lzm (Chinese input method - have not yet tried it)
Taiwan_cht_Language_Pack_2006_0801.lzm
Taiwan_cht_Fireflysung_font_Fireflysung.lzm (Chinese font)
TA.DA!! === a multilingual Linux PC ===
Still, I have a few things want to achieve, like be able to input Traditioanl Chinese & Japanese, be able to play music, and so on, but these will be my homewok for the next few weeks or so
Reference URLs (in no particular order):
- www.linuxfans.org/bbs/thread-138500-1-205.html
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support_(East_Asian)
- www.corelan.be:8800/index.php/2007/08/26/creating-and-installing-lzm-modules-in-backtrack-2
- knoppix.tnc.edu.tw/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3357&forum=3
- www.gamebase.com.tw/forum/37008/topic/82713285#82713285
- zivgt2.blogspot.com/2008/03/slax-6-for-dell-inspiron-700m.html
- sites.google.com/a/ab.ath.cx/netsurfing/Home/slax%e4%b8%ad%e6%96%87%e5%8c%96
- www.wretch.cc/blog/SWdoom/27211627
- docs.google.com/View?docid=ajkbrwfkpvrq_38hs2ckb
- people.ofset.org/~ckhung/p/mk-boot-usb/slax.en.php
- garyzyg.blogspot.com/2006/08/add-essential-cht-support-to-slax.html
- cle.linux.org.tw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=550
- webgnuru.com/linux/modify_slax.php
- hatochan.dyndns.org/slax-ja/index.php
- 2.csx.jp/livecdroom/
- blogs.yahoo.co.jp/cyksart/43293048.html
- www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=8537
- www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=29719
- cdlinux.info/wiki/doku.php/
# posted by David @ 9:31 PM 
