Aronzak’s Rantings

USB Linux Howto: Ttylinux 12 November, 2008

I’ve found ttylinux to be quite useful. For a while it was not actively maintained, but now Douglas Jerome has stepped up as the new maintainer. It’s a small, fast text based Linux distribution that is an invaluble part of my usb toolkit. It can mount a usb drive, giving quick access to be able to modify important files.

Nicely, while ttylinux is only ~10 megabytes, it has bash, the most used shell, rather than a smaller alternative. I’ve added in nano, an editor that I prefer to vi.

The default login is “root” password “root” or “guest” “guest”. Ttylinux loads its entire filesystem as an initial ram disk (initrd). The filesystem is easily modified (It’s a loopfile), but the bundled applications are fairly good. You can munt (and then modify) the entire system in an existing Linux install:

mkdir mount
mount -o loop filesys mount

NB. To start up properly, edit etc/rc.d/rc/sysinit and comment out these lines:

echo "Starting fsck for root filesystem."
fsck -T -C /
if [ "$?" -gt 2 ]; then
echo "WARNING: Errors found while checking root filesystem."
echo "You can login as root now, the system will reboot after logout."
sulogin
reboot
elif [ "$?" = "2" ]; then
echo "NOTICE: System needs to be rebooted now."
sleep 1
reboot
else
echo -n "Checking root filesystem: "
check_status

Or else fsck will fail on every boot (modified filesystem) and make you reboot.

The new version 8.0 is maturing. More final versions should be coming out fairly soon.