Globule in a keychain To demonstrate that Globule does not need huge systems to run on, we ported it to a keychain! All you need to do is plug it to a computer's USB port, and boot from the USB device. The keychain contains a full Linux operating system, X11, a browser, and Globule. Note that, although the displayed keychain has 256MB of memory, we only use below 64MB. The rest you can use for example to store your documents... If you would like to try out, we provide you the images to be burnt on a CD or written to a USB stick. Please note that these images contain a fairly old version of Globule, we provide them for your entertainment only. Up-to-date versions of Globule are always available here. To burn on a CD: Simply burn this image [49MB] into a CD, and boot from the CD. To write in a USB stick: You will need these two files: small-globule-usb1.tar.gz [2MB] and small-globule-usb2.tar.gz [28MB]. Partition the keychain with two partitions. The first can be small (~2880 KB) and must have the partition type of a ZIP drive (PPC PReP Boot, which has ID 0x41) to allow booting from a USB device. The second partition should have an Ext2 filesystem on it. With linux, one can use fdisk to do this and your table should look something like this: Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda: 260 MB, 260045312 bytes 8 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders Units = cylinders of 496 * 512 = 253952 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 12 2945 41 PPC PReP Boot /dev/sda2 13 1023 250728 83 Linux Format the first partition, mount it, and copy the first set of files containing the bootloader, kernel and initial boot disk to it, and then unmount the partition. Something like this: mkfs.msdos /dev/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 /mnt cd /mnt tar --extract --same-permissions --gzip --numeric-owner --file \ .../small-globule-usb1.tar.gz cd / umount /dev/sda1 Format the second partition, mount it, and copy the second set of files containing the root filesystem to it, and then unmount the partition, which under Linux would look something like: mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda2 mount /dev/sda2 /mnt cd /mnt tar --extract --same-permissions --gzip --numeric-owner --file \ .../small-globule-usb2.tar.gz cd / umount /dev/sda2 Now, make the stick bootable, by writing a default MBR to it, and install a syslinux bootsector on /dev/sda1. This is done using: lilo -M /dev/sda syslinux /dev/sda1 sync The USB stick is ready now, but you must make sure the computer you try this on, is actually installed to boot from the USB mass storage device. This depends on your BIOS of your computer, and older systems won't boot from it. Look for a BIOS menu item named boot, or similar and try to find an entry which will let you boot from a USB ZIP drive. A USB Floppy may work too. I have also found that on my AmiBIOS I need to enable Legacy support on the USB port. berry @ cs . vu . nl Last modified: Wed May 19 11:19:19 2004