4MLinux

This is an old piece and Mandriva (not its derivatives) extinct but not 4MLinux

Small Is beautiful with UnetBootIn and Making Mandriva Flashdrive

I do not do any of these now but sleep well since I changed to Debian.

As mentioned already Mandriva is good idea badly implemented and slow to boot. One can remember Mandriva had Globe Trotter and Live Pendrives. Now the new Mandriva is bulky and difficult to work with just for for fun I decided to make Mandriva Flashdrive (I do not know how long I will keep it before erasing the image).

Steps are as follows.

1. Download 4MLinux all in one. 2. Download Mandriva image (better try another distribution). 3. Boot 4MLinux 4. Go to maintenance and click UnetBootIn 5. Plug in a Flash drive (I tried 8 GiB Flashdrive) since the image is heavy. 

One has to format it with FAT beforehand. I had 6.5 for Mandriva and another 1.5 as a reserve partition. 6. Give the path to your image (need not be Mandriva any you have downloaded). Root—> Media—-> Disk—–> Image 7. Click OK and in about 5 minutes you have Mandriva in a Flash.

8. Now to reveal how bad the new Mandriva boots (if you have 1 GiB RAM like me), go and make a cup of Tea/Coffee. I finish my tea (boiling the water to brewing and drinking it before Mandriva booted and fired up the FireFox). It did not go to Mandriva site as it used to do.

This is why I am happy that I left Mandriva long time before their split and use 4MLinux for my work on Live sessions and say “Small is beautiful” and promote Unity Linux and (Core Linux on top of one can built ones own packages) its derivative HUMANity Musician edition (currently downloading, the last 100 or so MiB). Unity is one of the earliest Core Live CDs before PCLinux stormed the community with Big Daddy (only in archives now).

It broke away from Mandrake and formed Unity and there are at least 8 derivatives and one of which is TinyMe.

One does not need to be FAT to be productive when the cloud is promoting thin clients. 4MLinux even though tiny and only 60 odd MiB, it can be destructive if you use it’s partition utility without due care. It only detect the first hard disk and if you select sda1 instead of sdc or /d or /e by accident your will boot Mandriva Live instead of your prized distribution (gone as you press OK in the dialogue box) in the first hard disk. Please take care and the UnetBootIn graphic mode fonts are very tiny for an old folk like me.

But I did not do any mistakes, simply because I check my actions especially typos now before clicking OK in any command line operation.