[ixus_123]

This would be so cool. Having a partition so I could take my home folder & settings from one mac to another, say a laptop to a desktop or a friends mac etc.

I'm not lucky enough to have more than one mac but I think this woudl be such a cool feature. Or you could even get a whole Linux distro on it with plenty of room for your music so you could boot up any x86 PC, say in internet cafes etc. Puppy linux bootable from a USB drive for safe browsing etc

This thing has so much potential.

*I'd be happy to provide feed back, if you're reading this Steve & fancy sending one my way

[Randman]

No need for a partition. You can do this already with the hard-drive based iPods though I never heard of a flash being bootable. Trouble is it's good for an emergency boot but for sustained usage, it would strain the iPod drive. That's what PowerBooks and iBooks are for.


BTW, with my iPod photo, I have my entire hard drive (minus the music library) backed up and made bootable on it, via CCC.

However, as a 1GB USB drive, the shuffle is pretty good value considering the price.

[ixus_123]

I forgot the picture in my original post.


I too have a backup system on my 20gig iPod but even though it's a basic system, it's still a whole system. How do you just take the home partition?

Oh, & there are a few Linux distro that are bootable off USB or other distros bootable from LiveCDs, a miniCD, or even business card CD which you can then plug you USB /home partition in with saved email settings, documents etc. (Ofcourse business card CDs are not to clever to use with slot loaders)

Here's link to Puppy which can boot a whole system, web browser, email client, word processor, ftp (I think) etc all from only 50mb

Puppy Linux

There's also Damn Small Linux and a few others to look at. I think you can boot any linux distro from USB (bios permitting) but these ones stand out because they are so small.

[Michaelbetzel]

Originally posted by ixus_123:
This would be so cool. Having a partition so I could take my home folder & settings from one mac to another, say a laptop to a desktop or a friends mac etc.

I'm not lucky enough to have more than one mac but I think this woudl be such a cool feature. Or you could even get a whole Linux distro on it with plenty of room for your music so you could boot up any x86 PC, say in internet cafes etc. Puppy linux bootable from a USB drive for safe browsing etc

This thing has so much potential.

*I'd be happy to provide feed back, if you're reading this Steve & fancy sending one my way

uhhhhh... this is a huge part of the iShuffle's marketing ploy. It doubles as a flash drive, just like the iPods double as a hard drive.

[ixus_123]

but as a usb drive you can boot up a PC if you so wish with your own personal linux os or just /home if it already has linux on it & you want to just keep your personl settings.

All the iPods are firewire & it's just macs that boot off them at the moment.

Either way if Apple made it easy to take your /home with you it would be a great selling point imo. I'm not talking about just copying the /home folder & taking that, I mean having that /home with all your settings, prefs etc & being able to boot another mac as your own - ie log into your own account from the flash drive on some random mac.

[tooki]

Macs that have AGP graphics can boot from Mass Storage compliant USB devices, and from FireWire devices.

Mac OS is bootable from USB and FireWire.

Whether any of the Linux bootloaders work off of USB or FireWire is a different question which I don't know the current answer to.

tooki

[ixus_123]

Well I don't know about usb booting Linux on Apple hardware but on a PC I find it interesting that you can boot a whole operating system, with web browser, ftp client, emial client, word processor & many other apps all in under 50mb.

The area that interests me more is carrying around your /home

not just a copy of /home but actually being able to log in and have any Mac access the usb for your user account details so you'll have all your settings with you were ever you go.

I think I remember reading a tutorial when I joined macnn about puting /home on another partition. Doing this is kind of the same thing.