4MLinux-2.3-Small Is beautiful with UnetBootIn and Making Mandriva Flashdrive

Posted on September 3, 2011

4MLinux-2.3 to 48-Small Is beautiful with UnetBootIn and Making Mandriva Flashdrive

 4MLinux is a CD/DVD Image and CANNOT be booted from a USB, just like Gparted and Tails.

I wanted to try UnetBootIn on Live mode but could not.

UnetBootIn was the utility that I used to use to write an Iso Image to a USB stick in the good old days.

4MLinux is a miniature Linux distribution focusing on four capabilities: maintenance (by using it as a system rescue live CD), multimedia (for example, for playing video DVDs), miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and mystery (meaning small Linux games).

Features

 Maintenance (system rescue Live CD)

 Multimedia (e.g., playing video DVDs)

 Miniserver (using the inetd daemon)

 Mystery (console games)

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.
 

3. Boot 4MLinux
 

4. Go to maintenance and click UnetBootIn
 

5. Plug in a Flash drive (I tried 8 GB Flashdrive) since the image is heavy. 

One has to format it with FAT beforehand.
I had 6.5GB for Mandriva and another 1.5 GB as a reserve partition.
 

6. Give the path to your image (need not be Mandriva or any Image 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 GB 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 fire-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 one's own packages) its derivative of HUMANity Musician Edition (currently downloading, the last 100 or so MB).
 

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 MB, 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. 

 

I do not use Command Line now.