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ICT USB Sticks

Revision as of 23:12, 10 December 2014 by Andrew (talk | contribs)

Description

This is a USB stick used for some courses at Seneca. It boots very quickly (as little as 35 seconds) and comes with preinstalled software that we need.

The system image is read-only, so even if it's screwed up with bad commands run as root - it will return to the default once the system is rebooted. But the home directory is read-write so any files you save there will persist after a reboot.

Download and Install

  1. You'll need an ADATA UV128/32GB USB stick. You can use a different one but it has to be at least 31,037,849,600 bytes in size. A USB3 stick is highly recommended, even if you're using it in a USB2 port (the flash inside is faster).
    •  
    • Write your name and email on it! It really does happen that someone will find your stick and will try to return it, but only if they know who it belongs to!
  2. The process of downloading, extracting, and writing the image may take a long time depending on the speed of your network, computer, and USB port.
  3. Once you have the stick, insert it into your computer, preferably into a USB3 port (it's either blue in colour or has SS writen on it, short for SuperSpeed).
  4. Download the compressed image from here:
    • asd
  5. Then unzip it. You'll obviously need enough disk space for that, a total of probably 36GB (one compressed + one uncompressed file).
  6. Write the image to your USB stick:
    • If you're currently using linux - you can use the dd command to write to the USB stick. Make sure you write to the device file (e.g. /dev/sdb) and not any existing partition (e.g. /dev/sdb1). You'll need root permissions to be able to write to that device file.
      • e.g. dd bs=4K if=linuxmint-17.1-cinnamon-64bit-seneca-ict-2014-v1.adata32.img of=/dev/sdb
    • On windows you'll need to use Win32 Disk Imager. It's a free program.
  7. Once it's done writing - it's ready to use!

Problems

Please go to bugzilla to see existing problems and file new ones. Or if you can't be bothered to register there, send Andrew and email.