[Axiom-developer] Axiom on a thumb drive

[daly]

Axiom runs from a thumb drive. This is really trivial. 
It took about 1/2 hour from start to finish and now I have
a complete copy of Axiom, runnable on most machines, in my pocket.

Eventually I'll figure out how to build thumb images directly
so Axiom is native and these steps are not needed.

0) plug in a USB stick with sufficient space (see footnote 0)
1) visit https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator
2) download liveusb-creator-2.7.zip (see footnote 1)
3) unzip liveusb-creator-2.7.zip 
4) cd liveusb-creator-2.7
5) liveusb-creator-2.7.exe
6) set up about 500M (I used 1G) of "persistant overlay"
7) hit enter
8) when the process completes "safely remove the USB stick"

You need to follow this process once:

0) boot your computer and hit the PF key
1) boot fedora 9
------  (get axiom image) -----
2) start firefox
3) visit http://axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/download.html
4) download the fedora9 binary (see footnote 2)
5) cd /home/fedora/Download
6) tar -zxf axiom-fedora9-sept2008-bin.tgz

The thumb drive remembers Axiom but not the fedora breakage.
You'll need to do this each time, unfortunately.
You could put these steps in a shell script

------ (fix fedora breakage as root) ------
0) start an xterm
1) su -
2) echo 0 >/proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
3) echo 0 >/proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space
4) exit
------ (set up axiom) ------
5) cd axiom
6) export AXIOM=`pwd`/mnt/fedora9
7) export PATH=$AXIOM/bin:$PATH
------ (run axiom) ------
8) axiom



footnote 0: you don't need to erase your files. they will not be harmed.
    I used an 8 Gig stick and made a 1G "overlay area" but you can use
    much less. Axiom uses about 230 Megs and can be made smaller by 
    deleting pdfs, etc.

footnote 1: if you have wget you can do:
    wget 
https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-2.7.zip 

footnote 2: by default the fedora install puts the firefox downloads into
 /home/fedora/Download