ok, as I was backing up some client stuff these days I finally put together a small live Linux based system image you can just roll out on a 8 GB pen drive and plug it anywhere else to get a full functional system going as you can see on the attached screens and I thought that probably it would be a good idea to share it here in case somebody else can be interested/find it useful as well. first of all to begin with, this is not a release meant for everybody or just the general public, this is a release mostly intended for other experienced Linux/Darwin users and similar seasoned computing/system techs not for the everyday casual pc user. I post it here because from what I see I believe that around a third of the people on the site more or less meets this it specialist alike criteria so if you don't, please skip this as you're probably gonna get nowhere here at best. that said for those still reading here is how to roll out this from a working Linux system:
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curl -4s ftp://ftp.fpsclasico.de/livesys64.img.xz|xz -dc|dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 ibs=8192 count=970240 obs=1048576 status=progress
as usual you can use -4 or -6 as well as .de or .eu domains for the curl command as it works better for you to chose the download route. I guess that probably you can just directly pipe the xz output anywhere else so the dd command is probably optional but I believe it overall makes the process more robust and it generally speed the things up a bit. needless to say make absolutely sure to double, triple check as many times as necessary at all time where you're actually sending that as that will totally destroy any data on the destination for good. on the code posted I wrote /dev/mmcblk0 which typically correspond with the card reader, as said, you can probably send that image anywhere else (ex. /dev/sdX for a attached pen drive) or even to a local file (ex. ~/livesys64.img) to later run it on a emulator for example. whatever the case is, as said, just make completely sure you're sending it to the right place and not to your actual system disk for example. additionally don't forget that to directly write to block devices you typically need to either setup especial privileges or just to run as root. in any case, as said, I repeat once again be very careful with the deployment and be patience as it can probably take around 45+ minutes on old crappy usb pen drives for example.
well and pretty much that should be it, once you got that on a device basically it should be just plug it anywhere else and it should just boot and get the whole system going in a matter of minutes from it. the hardware requirements are just a uefi x86_64 machine with at least a bootable external port and a external storage device with at least 8 GB of space. being a minimalist kind of installment the base desktop runs at around 512 MiB of memory use and with the programs running at around 1 GiB (i.e. as I write this, check mails, browse web, edit files etc). provided you're gonna need some cache and some safe margins I'd said that this should typically run on any 2 GHz dual core with 2 GB of memory or better machine. as noted, this is a pure uefi only image, that's one of the requirements, you need a uefi firmware capable of booting external uefi images (in practice any 2010-2015+ computer/laptop should meet that and it should even even boot with secure mode enabled), it won't boot on legacy bios boot methods. additionally as hinted, I rolled out this physically on real machines but you can probably test it on a (uefi capable) emulator (ex. qemu) if you want, that's just a (xz compressed) raw block image. overall I believe this is the perfect backup/rescue system to mess around with some old laptops sitting around and a very interesting option to explore for mac users for example.
just as some final steps after plug this and enter the boot options on your computer this should just boot right away (provided it meets the requirements of course) if you seem to be having trouble booting or prefer to deal with that manually as well instead of leaving the firmware to automatically deal with that you can as well enter the command bellow after have rolled out the image on your device in order to manually create the appropriated uefi entry for the system you've just rolled out (again remember to change /dev/mmcblk0 by your actual device and double, triple check it and that obviously also requires privileges).
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efibootmgr -c -d /dev/mmcblk0 -g -p 1 -l "\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi" -L "Fedora-LXQt-Live 36"
and you should be all done, as usual, once the system booted for the first time, don't forget to setup the proper locales/timezone for you as showed on the screen and to reboot or log-out/log-back-in afterwards for the changes to set in. the image obviously come with the fpsclassico Quake III Arena client pre-installed although you still need to put your pak0.pk3 file there somehow either by copying it from your hard drive or just from the net as shown on the attached screen for example. for the storage it has around 6 GiB of free space 2 for programs and 4 for user files and the changes should be persistent although probably for other than configuration and a few occasional installs here and there and a few extra small software there's no need to tell that the system is mostly intended just as-is (a live backup/rescue minimalist portable system) and not as a full size production workstation.
ok, that's all, now I just wonder if there will be somebody around that will try this and how the experience will be.
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