Friday, July 27, 2007

USB boot for Linux/Fedora

I purchased an eSATA enclosure so that I could boot multiple OSs and have something for backup. I've got CentOS4 (repackaged RHEL 4) on there for some older software that I use for work. The eSATA enclosure also has a usb port while my laptops don't have an eSATA port.

I want to be able to boot the eSATA enclosure when using USB. Since most of the kernels that come with a distribution don't support booting from USB, I had to make some changes. Using this website as a guide I was able to setup the CentOS update kernel.

This was the only command that I had to was:

mkinitrd --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=usb-storage --preload=scsi_mod --preload=sd_mod /boot/usbinitrd.img 2.6.9-1.667smp

Make sure that you modify it for your kernel version.

The difference in speed between eSATA and USB is really evident here. The timed buffered disk reads are:
eSATA ~71MB/sec
USB: ~31MB/sec

Update:
I recommend that you setup the usbinitrd image while you're still connected to the eSATA connection, otherwise you may have to use the rescue CD to perform the operations described by the external website.

Also, I have USB 2.0 ports on my laptop and the enclosure supports USB 2.0. I would imagine that a USB 1.1 port is very much slower. See the comments sections.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Eclipse CDT Packaged for Windows

Doug Schaefer is putting together a pre-packaged Eclipse CDT for Windows called Wascana Desktop Developer. It includes the following:
  • Eclipse Platform runtime
  • Eclipse CDT runtime
  • MinGW toolchain: binutils, gcc, g++, gdb
  • MinGW runtime libraries: mingw-runtime, w32api
  • Simple Directmedia Layer library, better known as SDL
  • MSYS GNU command line environment
  • Sun's redistributable Java Runtime Environment
Another nice to have features would be a subversion plugin.