Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GnuRadio on PCI-104 (i.e., Fedora on USB Flash Drive)

[Jason]

Bahn, William L Civ USAFA/DFCS wrote:
> I have GnuRadio up and running on some Fujitsu Tablet PC under Fedora Core 6.
>
> I need to get GnuRadio up and running on some PCI-104 embedded processors, 
> which means I need the O/S to boot from a USB key. I have a 4 GB key but am 
> willing to purchase an 8 GB or even a 16 GB key if that's what it takes.

What embedded processor?  If it's x86, it won't be a problem. 
Otherwise, you could be in for a world of fun.  ;-)

> The PCI-104 has 1 GB of DRAM.

ummm, do you mean PC/104, like here [1]?

> Is there a fairly straightforward way to get Fedora to run from a USB key?

Never tried it, sorry.

> An alternative would be: Does anyone know of a Linux distro that can be made to 
> run from a USB key that we can get GnuRadio up and running on without too much 
> heartache. We've tried installing it on DSL (Damn Small Linux) but can't get 
> the fftw libraries to compile.

I've installed both Gentoo and Ubuntu to thumbdrives.  Both fit on a 
4GB.  Gentoo will have a _lot_ more room left afterwards.  If you're 
comfortable at the command line, try Gentoo.  Otherwise, use Ubuntu.  I 
personally run gnuradio on Gentoo, and it works well.  Folks on this 
list seem to have good results with Ubuntu, although I have never tried 
gnuradio on it myself.

The easiest way to do it would be to pull the hard drive from a laptop, 
boot from the Ubuntu CD, and plug in the thumb drive (should be the only 
disk in the laptop in order to avoid accidentally overwriting the boot 
sector of other drives).  Then proceed with install.

Once the usb drive is done, if you have boot issues, it's most likely 
because USB isn't initialized yet when the kernel looks for the rootfs. 
 I've added a script to the Ubuntu initramfs to fix this.  Once added, 
Ubuntu automagically keeps the change through kernel updates.  Let me 
know if you need it.

hth,

Jason.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/104