Xubuntu 8.04.1 on USB drive

For an upcoming Okinawa LUG meeting, I wanted to prepare a pendrive linux, so I thought “Why not Xubuntu on a USB key?”.
I’ve been using XFCE as my main desktop DE for several weeks now and am quite happy with it. Xubuntu is the “light” Ubuntu distro, so it is a good candiate for a USB-based install.

USB Keyboard, Be Still!

Edited to Add: This is not 100% working yet, as I recently found out upon a re-boot. I will update when I have it all figured out.

Also: Why is wordpress goofing up my code tags!! I can’t figure out why it ignores or replace them around my code examples! So frustrating.

Stand still, why don’t you!?

As mentioned in an earlier post, I needed to get Ventrilo working. That post pretty much covered the audio side of it, but there was one minor issue left: a script is needed to pass keyboard input to Ventrilo (“push-to-talk” functionality), even though it is running in the background and the video game in the front has the focus.

The problem is that my USB keyboard changes the /dev/input/event slot every time I reboot, and you must use this /dev/input/event information in a couple of places. So, I was having to manually edit a couple of files every time I rebooted in order for the set-up to work right.

Here’s how I got around that problem….

Reboot loop resolved (I hope)

One thing leads to another…

There are a hand-full of issues – most minor – I have been working my way through. A big one, though, was the reboot loop I mentioned in a couple of posts.

External USB Drive

Movin’ On

I have a few external USB drives, and one is my “Library” drive, where I keep music, documentation, and videos. It is a 750G Seagate FreeAgent Pro and previously I had been using it under Windows XP.

Converting

This drive had been acting a little bit strange under Ubuntu. It would work fine, but after a while it would “disappear”, as if it had been un-mounted or something. The drive name would still appear in Nautilus, but no contents.

Now, I don’t know (yet) if it will make a difference, but I wanted to go ahead and change the drive from NTFS to ext3. The main reason, of course, is that I am working towards removing every last trace of Microsoft products and technologies, and there’s just no reason for me to have this drive in a non-Linux format. So…

Truecrypt in Ubuntu

The problem

I use Truecrypt on an external USB drive to protect sensitive information. The entire drive is encrypted, and this is something I have done for a while – so the drive is NTFS formatted because I used it under WinXP as well.

Anyway, today I needed to access the drive and I wanted to do it from Ubuntu.

The solution

1. Obviously, get Truecrypt – I was pleased to find a 64-bit Ubuntu binary package available.

2. I had to determine where my USB drive was – it did not show up simply by my plugging it in, which I assume is because the entire drive is encrypted.

2a. With the drive not plugged in:
$ dmesg > dmesg1

2b. Plug in the USB drive and wait a minute:
$ dmesg > dmesg2

2c. See what changed:
$ diff dmesg1 dmesg2 > dmesg_dif
$ nano dmesg_diff

I got something that looked like this:

559a560,575
> [ 1894.053699] usb 8-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address$
> [ 1894.184176] usb 8-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
> [ 1894.184541] scsi10 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
> [ 1894.184598] usb-storage: device found at 5
> [ 1894.184601] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
> [ 1899.035299] usb-storage: device scan complete
> [ 1899.039924] scsi 10:0:0:0: Direct-Access FUJITSU MHV2060AH 08$
> [ 1899.041103] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] 117210240 512-byte hardware sectors (60012$
> [ 1899.042321] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
> [ 1899.042329] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
> [ 1899.043174] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] 117210240 512-byte hardware sectors (60012$
> [ 1899.044373] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
> [ 1899.044375] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
> [ 1899.044378] sdb: unknown partition table
> [ 1899.119887] sd 10:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
> [ 1899.119924] sd 10:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0

From that, it was easy enough to tell that the drive was sitting on /dev/sdb.

3. Create a mounting point, I used:
$ sudo mkdir /media/tc

4. I mounted the drive using truecrypt:
$ truecrypt /dev/sdb /media/tc

That’s it! The volume appeared on the desktop and I could read and write from it!