I spent more than 4 hours yesterday trying to install SliTaz from a USB drive on my Dell D610 laptop. I really wanted to use it and I liked the interface better than puppy linux but I was not able to find the instructions for solving my particular use case. Finally I was able to figure out a way and I wanted to share the steps by steps instructions that I followed for installing the software on the laptop. Such that others could also benefit from my frustration.
My requirement/usecase was to install the SliTaz 4.0 OS on my hard drive permanently using the USB drive. I did not want to burn a CD ROM just to install the software. I had to use two USB drives for installing the software. May be I might have missed some simple steps :( With a few trial and errors here are the instructions I followed that allowed me to install SliTaz 4.0 on my fresh hard drive:
1. Get a fresh copy of the SliTaz 4.0 iso file from http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/
2. Download a copy of syslinux-4.04 from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/.
Note 1: I had to use this utility to convert SliTaz 4.0 iso to hybrid format to burn the SliTaz iso to usb drive on linux using the dd command. I was not able to use unetbootin for this step. I also could not use isotousb to create bootable usb.
Note 2: I tried with syslinux-4.04 but probably other versions of syslinux might work as well.
Note 3: At some point in my trial and error, I was able to get a bootable usb using yumi-0.0.8.3 as well without first running the isohybrid.pl command.
3. Extract the syslinux-4.04 zip / tar.gz file to the local hard drive.
4. Find out the location of the isohybrid.pl (from the extracted syslinux-4.04 zip file) and execute the following instruction to convert SliTaz 4.0 iso file to iso hybrid format:
% perl isohybrid.pl slitaz-4.0.iso
Note 4: My linux box already had perl installed. But this should work on windows as well using appropriate perl version.
5. Insert the usb drive on the computer and use one of the “variants” of the following command on linux to write the slitaz iso to a usb:
% sudo dd if=slitaz-4.0.iso of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct bs=1048576
Note 5: I did not try but it may be possible to use unetbootin or yumi in this step as well.
Note 6: Please take extra caution to specify the “of” parameter (/dev/sdb in the command/example above). This essentially tells the where the removable / bootable usb drive has been mounted on your computer. This should NOT have any numbers such as “/dev/sdb1”, “/dev/sdb2”, etc. In order to find out the location, you can try to use commands such as: “% sudo fdisk –l” or “gparted” whichever is convenient for you.
6. The above step above should create a bootable usb from which you can install SliTaz 4.0. Let us name this usb as “usb-1”.
7. Get another usb drive and copy slitaz-4.0.iso to this drive. I had to copy it to a separate usb. Let us name this as “usb-2”. I copied the file to a usb formatted to “vfat”/DOS.
8. Insert the bootable usb (“usb-1”) on the computer on which we are trying to install slitaz-4.0 and boot the computer from this usb.
9. Insert “usb-2” on the same computer and find out the appropriate device. For my case:
/dev/sda -> was the ide/sata hard drive on which we were trying to install SliTaz 4.0
/dev/sdb -> bootable usb (“usb-1”)
/dev/sdc -> “usb-2” containing SliTaz-4.0.iso image
10. Now get an x-terminal and using root (user id) account, create a mount point such that the SliTaz-4.0.iso image is accessible during the install step (see below):
% su
password:
# mkdir /mnt/usb
# mount -t vfat /dev/sdc /mnt/usb
Note 7: do not use any letters (e.g. /dev/sdc1 or /dev/sdc2) in the command above
11. Make sure that the image slitaz-.4.0.iso is available on the /mnt/usb directory:
# ls –l /mnt/usb
Note 8: I had to use this step as SliTaz installation program was not able to recognize the usb drive as the valid device/media containing the SliTaz image / files.
12. From the Tazpnel select "Install SliTaz" (right most menu item). For disk partitioning, I simply selected /dev/sda as the entire hard drive on which to install the OS. I did not experiment with dual boot partition.
13. In one of the steps, specified the location of the SliTaz image as /mnt/usb/slitaz-4.0.iso.
There could have been an easier way :( I tried to follow the instructions on the installation wiki but was not able to follow the instructions for my particular case. I am sharing these instructions for others who had similar usecase as mine and might have given home of SliTaz. I found the OS very fast, had pleasing interface (as compared to puppy linux) and should suffice for most of my basic browsing needs. If you have any further comments or any feedback, please send it to me at ypant@yahoo.com.
