Using antiX live usb on Lenovo Ideapad S100.

I am presently at Bhopal and the family has Lenovo Ideapad S100 Netbook with Windows 7. I had made usb stick with latest antiX-15 which I decided to try on this netbook.

On this Netbook pressing F12 on boot is supposed to bring Boot Menu but it did not work (may be because F12 is actually Fn+F11 and Fn key may not be working on boot).

Pressing F2 however brings the BIOS Set up. In BIOS Set up Boot Tag I could see the USB Stick but there is no provision to bring it up and make it first boot device.

But I could disable booting from Hard Disk (first boot device) by putting a "x" by pressing "x" key and save settings.

Then I could boot from USB and  now posting this on Iceweasel (Open Source Firefox) on antiX-15.

This machine has 2 GB RAM and antiX is very fast.

Review of antiX-15 USB persist on UEFI Secure Boot.

On 30th June 2015 new version of antiX called antiX-15 (Killah P) was released. I was impressed with the announcement "Want to run live on a box with UEFI bootloader? antiX can do this", and immediately wanted to test this.

I downloaded antiX-15-V_64-full.iso from souceforge. The announcement recommended Unetbbotin to make live usb but unfortunately Unetbootin crashed while selecting the iso file. I used dd command to copy the iso to usb but it allowed me to boot only in Legacy mode of BIOS.

I posted on antiX Forum and was advised to mount the iso and simply copy the contents (same like what I recommend for Ubuntu 14.04 for UEFI)

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop,ro  antiX-15-V_64-full.iso /mnt/iso
cp -a /mnt/iso/. /media/USB_mount_point/

 After selecting boot from usb in BIOS Boot Menu I could boot into antiX default Desktop with secure boot on since antiX has Microsoft signed kernel image.

Then I wanted to make the usb persistent. I used the cheat-code "persist=root!,home" in grub boot line but was getting blank screen.

I created the rootfs and homefs files and placed them in /antiX folder on usb even then it did not work:

dd if=/dev/zero of=rootfs bs=1M count=0 seek=1024
mkfs.ext4 -q -m 0 -O ^has_journal -F rootfs
dd if=/dev/zero of=homefs bs=1M count=0 seek=1024
mkfs.ext4 -q -m 0 -O ^has_journal -F homefs 

After struggling for a day I was told to change "gfxpayload=text" to "gfxpayload=keep" in grub.cfg and it worked.