Trisquel On A Sugar Toast

Revision as of 14:20, 10 October 2009 by Quidam (talk | contribs) (Added install to disk)

Trisquel on a Sugar toast (TOAST from now on) is a live/installable iso image that can be run from a CD/DVD or be used to load a USB drive with data persistence. Some other advanced uses are described below.

Main features

 
TOAST boot menu
  • Sugar 0.86.2 with the Fructose and Honey activities.
  • Built on top of Trisquel 3.0 (based on Ubuntu 9.04), making it 100% free.
  • 430MB iso image for i386 PC's. An amd64 version is available, but not published as it might make distribution a little more complicated while providing almost no advantages.
  • 30 languages included (English as default):
    • ar bn ca de el en es eu fa fr gl he hi it ja mg mn nb ne nl pt_PT ru si sl sq sv tr ur vi zh_CN
  • Graphical boot splash with translated options menu
  • Graphical USB-creator tool built in
  • Sugar-style artwork

More info and screenshots can be found here: http://trisquel.info/gl/trisquel-con-sugar

Download

The latest snapshot can be found here:

Install to disk

You can use TOAST live from a removable media, or perform a permanent install as you do with any GNU/Linux distro. You can select "Install Triquel" in the main boot menu to do so. If you already started a live session, you can manually launch the installer by running "ubiquity" in the terminal activity.

Create a USB thumb drive

A Live USB thumb drive runs faster and allows the user to keep the data and settings for the next run. To get that, download the iso and burn it on a blank CD. Start a Live session with it, plug your flash drive and open the terminal activity. Run the command usb-creator and follow the instructions to configure your USB drive. If it is FAT formated -the most usual format for this units-, the data on it will not be erased, and will remain accessible.

Advanced uses

Live CD persistence

You can achieve user data persistence by loading TOAST from a handy USB drive, but you can also use a regular Live CD for that, and it will work in systems with no USB-boot capabilities. You just need to pass the "persistent" parameter to the Live CD kernel -pressing F4 in the boot menu-, and have a ext2 (ext3 and 4 will work to) partition labeled "live-rw" available in any disk. It can be a USB flash drive too.

Any data in the /home directory will be stored in the live-rw partition, if you need to install a persistent file outside /home, as a config file or a program, or even install some deb packages, you just need to label the partition "casper-rw" instead. For normal Sugar use,

This method is useful to save space in the thumb drive for persistence data, and also because the persistence partition can be mounted and accessed from other computers. It can be used to have live persistent sessions in systems that cannot boot from USB, but this will work faster if you use the method described next.

USB load helper

Some computers -like Apple's- cannot boot an operating system from a thumb drive, and in some cases the computer is not configured to do so and the user doesn't have the privileges or knowledge to do that, and a CD is the only method for booting a system. As USB images run faster and can provide integrated persistence, you might want to use the Live CD to load just the kernel and run the live session from the faster flash drive instead. You just need to create a Live USB drive using the method described above, and boot the computer with both the CD and the USB drive inserted. Set the computer to boot from the CD, and it will load the kernel and search for USB drives to continue booting from them.

Easy virtualized images

The above methods can also be used in a virtualization application like VirtualVox or KVM. You just need to start a live session using the TOAST iso, format the virtual disk with ext3, label it "live-rw" and reboot. Since then, the virtual disk will store the persistent data. If a new TOAST iso is released, you just need to replace the image attached to your virtualization system.

Updating

To get the latest version of the Sugar activities, just open the updater in the user settings window. To update the Trisquel system underneath, open a terminal and run this commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This procedure will also update the Fructose activities, and it will no interfere with the Sugar updater in any way.

Changelog