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How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick
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  1. #1
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    How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    I've been having fun over the last few days with putting a Linux installation onto the SD card in my phone, so that I can then boot my computer up from it. Just plug the phone into any old PC, reboot, tell it to boot off the USB device, and there you go... all my docs are now stored encrypted on my phone, and I can even mount the encrypted partition directly on the phone if I want so that I can get to the files when I'm on the move. I've been carrying a live USB stick round with me for years, but I might ditch it in favour of just booting straight off the phone.

    Full details if you want to try it out:

    How to use your Android phone as a Linux live USB stick

    James

  2. #2
    motnahp00 Guest

    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Awesome James! Are you also the author in the link provided?

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Quote Originally Posted by motnahp00
    Awesome James! Are you also the author in the link provided?
    Yes. (Hadn't intended to disguise that.)

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    This rocks! Great work and thanks for sharing!

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    I have installed Fedora14 live on my memorycard 8GB (Nokia5800musicexpress) with persistence of 1Gb with Fedoraliveusbcreator in non-destructive way. (Do not format memorycard with parted. Phone will reformat the card on reconnection. Do not disturb default folders on memorycard.) Fedora booted successfully but persistence not worked. (Setting not saved.) Thereafter i installed ubuntu with latest unebootin which allows persistence for ubuntu. Successful.

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Hi new user here. So if I use my existing sd card on my android it wont delete my files? Of course backing up first.

    Thanks

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Quote Originally Posted by whyite
    Hi new user here. So if I use my existing sd card on my android it wont delete my files? Of course backing up first.

    Thanks
    If you're carefull enough it shouldn't delete your files.
    I just wonder how responsive your Fedora will be seeing as it has to run through usb2 instead of Sata600 or otherwise...

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Fedora runs fairly well from USB 2 cards, in my experience.
    Kurt Driver
    Vancouver, Canada

    https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Driver-1479

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Quote Originally Posted by kurtdriver
    Fedora runs fairly well from USB 2 cards, in my experience.
    Yes, it works wonderfully well. It's slightly slower when booting up, but in use, it's amazingly responsive. The cacheing is very impressive.

    Of course, if you do anything that involves sustained thrashing, it slows right down. But I've recompiled kernels and played HD video and used Eclipse for Java coding and a million other things, all without any trouble at all.

    James

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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    A brilliant and awesome feat! And a very nice how-to too! Nice work!

    I always carry my customized live USB stick with me so I immediately checked my Samsung Galaxy S with GParted and was dismayed to see that it showed that the SD drive was an 'unallocated' partition, yet Nautilus can see it. I'm not bold enough to copy everything off it, and reformat it as fat32 and copy everything back.

    One has to be careful with Samsung because they tend to mix third-party proprietary bits in with their Android. (I got burned trying to corss-compile mplayer/alsa.)

    If anybody gets this working on a Galaxy S, please post here.
    Last edited by cheerio158; 23rd April 2011 at 02:49 PM.

  11. #11
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    Re: How to turn your Android phone into a Fedora live USB stick

    Odd. If Nautilus can see it, that suggests that the Linux kernel supports whatever the filesystem is, which is half the battle.

    The Fedora script that installs to a USB stick insists on installing to FAT32 or ext2/3/4, but I don't know if there's any great reason for that. All it's doing is putting some files on the drive, and then installing Grub in the MBR and telling it where to find the boot image.

    So as far as I can see, all you need is a filesystem that's compatible with Grub (so you can start the boot process) and with the Linux kernel (so that you can do the second half of the booting).

    The one caveat is that you need to get the installation script to update the MBR. It's conceivable that that could screw up something on the Galaxy S, but I don't really see why it should. If you have a way of getting into recovery mode, it should be a fairly safe experiment, because you can take a backup of the whole disk, and then put it back afterwards. (From recovery mode, mount the USB drive, and then use dd to copy the whole thing off; if everything goes wrong, go back into recovery mode, mount the USB drive again, and use dd to put it back.)

    James

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