add video drivers to persistant storage ubuntu pen drive?

[iansane]

Hi,

A while back I successfully installed Ubuntu 8.10 to a 32G thumbdrive with persistant storage. When I tried booting to another PC the video driver didn't work.

My question is,

How can I install several known drivers and make it so my bootable pendrive Ubuntu will select the correct driver based on what machine it is plugged into?

Or should setting the default driver to vesa work on most machines and how do I do that?

I want to be able to use this as a repair/rescue disk. Because of the persistant storage I can install anti virus programs and update definitions on a regular basis to use it for scanning windows machines. I just need to insure that it will boot with working video drivers to multiple manufacturer and model PC's.

Thanks for any help or other suggestions to achieve what I am trying to do here.

[Rubberman]

Your idea about using the generic vesa driver is appropriate. You can install multiple video drivers in the system, and can configure them with custom /etc/X11/xorg.conf files, such as xorg.conf.nvidia, xorg.conf.vesa, etc. Set up an init script that runs before X starts to ask the user which driver they should use, and then copy the appropriate xorg.conf file to the actual /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You are going to need to play with this a bit before you get it right.

In any case, with your proposed uses of the device, I recommend going with the generic vesa driver. Once you have booted the system, you can run the system-config-display tool and change the driver from the list of available drivers on the system (there are a lot of them), as well as the type and resolution of the display attached. Once you do that, you can restart the x server. Then when you are done, before shutting down the system, change the video driver back to vesa and the display type and resolution accordingly, or just add to the shutdown scripts instructions to copy the xorg.conf.vesa file that you created before back to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.