Linux Emulator On A Flash Drive

[rhathar]

Hello everyone, and I hope we can work on this project together and create something great that may benefit students everywhere If a current working project of this is availible, I would appreciate any information on it.

The Problem:
Working in labs and with beginner-linux classes, I noticed a problem. New students need access to a Linux environment to do their work on, but many are not technically savvy enough (or willing/able) to format/partition their home drives. Also, while Live CDs are great, computers in the school labs will not allow them to boot from them. Furthermore, the school Redhat server only allows students to connect to it from within the labs themselves.

Essentially, students found actually accessing linux for their classes was very hard.

A Solution:
I had an idea for simply running Cygwin, which works great BUT: while students now have a basic Linux environment at home, it's different from the ones at school, and it's not portable. So I took it one step farther: put it on a Flash drive. The problem I found with this is that Cygwin requires files it installs on the current OS - making it non-portable.

The end result was MSys (www.mingw.org) - a Cygwin fork that's incredibly small (>50MB w/ MinGW addons), and it's self-contained so doesn't require anything on the computer it runs off of. Once installed, you can simply plug the Flash drive into any Windows USB port and you have a Linux environment. You need no permissions on the current computer whatsoever.

The New Problem:
My new dilemma is this: MSys is just what it stands for: a Minimalist System. It lacks functions the courses require (small things: DD, cal, etc) and I lack the know-how to add them.

If successful, the university will start implementing these as soon as next semester. Right now I am working on an internship involving this.

Question:
How can I go about adding functions to MSys? So far, the only lacking functionality that I've added is 'clear'.

Missing functions that the course requires include: cal, more, passwd, whatis, join, lpr, paste, pr, tput, afio, cpio, dd, df, du, file, finger, free, edquota, top, w, who, ifconfig, netstat, ping

** There are more functions, but many can be bypassed or are impossible (I think) like fsck can't run as far as I know on an emulator.


Thank you everyone that takes the time to read this! I hope to be successful with this project, as it's already SO close! MSys runs fine and has good functionality - it just needs that extra little push.

-Rhathar

[Vergil83]

Another way to do this would be using dsl. You can make a version of dsl that boots in windows from a flash drive using qemu. I have installed on a part of a flash drive and run in on windows as a user. It works pretty good (a little slow) and very easy to set up anywhere
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i...SB_Flash_Drive

[rhathar]

Thanks. Though correct me if I'm wrong but DSL is a BOOTABLE Flash drive, no?

What I'm working on is just an emulator. The goal is to provide a portable linux environment that the user can use at any computer, regardless of their permissions. Many labs won't let you restart the computer and boot to something else, for obvious reasons

[xxqq]

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Remote-X-Apps.html

If you have powerful server running Linux, perhaps you can use remote X terminal emulator on top of Windows.

Or you can use USB:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com

[rhathar]

Hi, and thanks for responding xxqq. Unfortunately, like I said in my original post, I'm looking for something that does NOT require booting from the device (be it CD, floppy or USB), and hosting a server is not feasible as the University already has one such set up and has decided NOT to allow remote login (outside the firewall).

[gruven]

Thanks. Though correct me if I'm wrong but DSL is a BOOTABLE Flash drive, no?

What I'm working on is just an emulator. The goal is to provide a portable linux environment that the user can use at any computer, regardless of their permissions. Many labs won't let you restart the computer and boot to something else, for obvious reasons

I think he was saying it was emulated from the flash drive using Qemu, which would not require rebooting. You may or may not have to install qemu on the host computer because I am not sure if you can use qemu on the flash drive or not. Something to look into though.

Also, there is the LivePC Engine.

[Vergil83]

gruven is correct that it does not require booting. In windows, while logined as a regular user you can dsl. It runs inside windows. You can do both linux stuff and windows stuff at the same time. I have run if from a flash driver (it was an old 256, dsl took up part, I had portable firefox and saved files in another partition of the flash drive. The dsl partition is in fat32 too!

Here is a image of someone running windows inside debian. You can do it the other way around (that is how I have done it)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Screenshot.png

[xxqq]

Perhaps you can use
1. Qemu.
2. Blackdog PowerPC Linux server on USB.
3. Wireless LAN server with Linux.
4. CoLinux.

http://www.livecdforums.com/viewtopi...4a52892102f917

http://www.projectblackdog.com/

http://www.colinux.org/

If the PC can be booted from floppy, perhaps you can use floppy based distro or smart boot manager.