antix live iso download Antix live iso download. This is an easy step-by-step guide to booting anti X Live Media (LiveCD, LiveUSB, etc). It was inspired by rokytnji’s many step-by-step guides on the anti X forums. Step 0: Booting the computer. Sometimes it goes by so fast you might want to take a picture of it because it contains a couple of pieces of vital information. In the image above it says "Press DEL to run Setup" and it also says "Press F9 for BBS POPUP". This means you can access the BIOS set up with the key and you can get to the boot option menu with the key. These keys are different on different computer systems ( *** sigh *** ). If you are very lucky, your computer might already be setup to boot from the CD Drive first, or even boot from a USB stick first. If not then you will either need to go into the BIOS Setup and adjust the boot order (to change things permanently) or invoke the boot option menu to change the boot order for just this one time. You should be able to figure out which entry is for the CDROM and which one is for the USB stick. Very old computers can not boot from USB so the USB stick won’t show up as one of the options. When you succeed in booting the Live Media you will see a (hopefully) brief text message flash by and then you will end up with the boot loader menu. Step 1: The Boot Loader menu. If you run into difficulties boot, this menu will be your starting point, your base camp for assaulting the peak of Mount antiX. You might see a clock symbol at the end of the highlighted line. Whether you do or not, I suggest you hit the key followed by the key. This will disable auto-start and give you time to think. Once you hit a key (most keys anyway) the timer has been deactivated and you don’t have to worry about being suddenly whisked away to the next step. You use the and arrow keys to move between preselect groups of options. You should see the text in the "Boot Options" line near the bottom of the screen change. It shows you the preset options. You can add other options just by typing them in or you can use the and arrow keys to edit one or more of the preset options. The Option Index page lists all the common options alphabetically in case you want to find out what a particular option does. If you have trouble booting, the primary tool you will use to fix things is to type in options at the Boot Loader menu. Once you have the options like you want them hit to continue the boot process. If you get to this stage but are having trouble booting, you can adjust the size of the text that will be displayed in the next step with the vga option. This can be extremely helpful. Step 2: the linuxrc bootstrap. This next step involves the bootstrap script. It reports what it is doing in text mode. Often, this is where the problems occur. Antix live iso download. The intended audience for this guide includes: People who write scripts for frugal installs and LiveUSBs. People who will write tools for user to access persistence and live-remastering. Developers who want to use the new anti X linuxrc with other distributions. Adventurous and/or curious beta-testers. This is meant to be the definitive guide to all the features and options in the new linuxrc bootstrap script. It probably contains way too much information for most end-users, especially newcomers. Ideally, this guide will be augmented with information for end users, or a second guide will be created that is specifically designed for end users. What’s New? The linuxrc bootstrap script (that lives inside the initrd.gz file) was almost totally rewritten. We now use a non-ancient version of BusyBox (which, combined with more modern Linux kernels) gives us access to new and better tools. The Knoppix linuxrc script provided great inspiration for a lot of this. Some of the more prominent new features include: Faster, more robust booting. Previously the rootdelay option was used and suggested as a fix for when linuxrc is unable to find the squashfs program and the user is dropped to a limited shell. With the new linuxrc the rootdelay option should only be needed if the: Welcome to AntiX ! message does not appear. In addition, you can now specify the boot partition by disk-label or by disk-UUID. There should be fewer failures to boot Live Media and when a boot does fail, the steps to fix it should be easy and straightforward. Better and faster root persistence. Root and home persistence files can now reside on the boot device, the same device that holds the linuxfs file. This means you can create a full featured LiveUSB (or LiveHD) using only one partition even with persistence and live-remastering. We can also scan all read-write devices for persistence files which makes it easy to add persistence to a liveCD as long as there is some read-write partition available to hold the persistence file(s). Integrated md5 checking. If the Live Media creator (person or program) adds .md5 files in the same directory as the linuxfs file or the same directory as the .iso file (in fromiso mode) then if the check boot parameter is given, every file that has a matching .md5 file will be checked and the boot will be interrupted if any check fails. Live remastering. Remastering involves (perhaps among other things) the creation of a new linuxfs file that reflects change that have been made to the system (usually the addition or deletion of packages). We can now offer users "one click" live remastering (for LiveUSBs and LiveHDs) that will create a new linuxfs file at the touch of a button and automatically use that linuxfs file on the next reboot. The user will always have the option to rollback the change even if the new linuxfs file is corrupted and fails to boot. Antix live iso download. Label the boot partition and use bootlabel. Align your partitions and use large block sizes. Use a boot directory containing the anti X version in its name. Leave space for remastering and/or root and home persistence. Advantages. A LiveUSB has many advantages over a LiveCD: It boots much faster. It is smaller and more rugged. It usually has a much larger capacity. You can write to it so you can have persistence and remastering. You can have multiple partitions, including swap. You can have several different versions on the same USB stick. Disadvantages. But there are some disadvantages as well: A LiveCD is read-only so it can be more secure than a LiveUSB. Many older computers can’t boot from a USB stick but they can boot from a CD. Why re-invent the wheel? Many tools already exist to create a LiveUSB from a LiveCD iso image. Why don’t we just use the existing tools and be done with it? The answer is because the existing tools don’t let you take advantage of the new features that a LiveUSB makes possible, in particular: persistence, remastering and multiple operating systems. In addition, it is now possible to make LiveUSBs that boot more reliably. Game Plan. The basic idea is to do a frugal install on a single large partition with the three basic files (vmlinuz, initrd.gz, and linuxfs) in a single directory that is labeled by the anti X version and kernel type (486 or 686). In addition, we label this partition so the bootstrap program doesn’t have to go searching for it. I like to use an ext2 or ext3 filesystem although it is possible to use a fat32 (or other) filesystem. Do a "Frugal Install" by copying the linuxfs file. Put all three boot files in the same directory labeled by OS and version. Add a label to the boot partition. Example. In this example we will put three different versions of anti X (12 686 full, 12 686 base, and 12 486 core) on the same USB stick. follow the convention that "686" and "full" are defaults and thus can be omitted from the directory names. Here is the file layout on the boot partition: Antix live iso download. If you’re a first-time user of antiX — welcome! Instead of a heavy common Desktop Environment, antiX uses window managers to control what the end-user can see and do. We hope these FAQs will give you a basic orientation to antiX and its window managers, and provide the means to explore further on your own. antiX comes in four flavours for 32 and 64 bit boxes. antiX comes as a full distro (c1GB), a base distro (<700MB), a core distro (c310MB) and a net distro (c150MB) all with a kernel that will boot "antique" PII, PIII computers as well as the latest "modern" processors. The full flavour will not fit on a cd. The base version fits on a cd, but does not include libroffice as well as some other applications. By default, antiX loads into a Rox-IceWM desktop with a few icons on the desktop. Use F6 at the boot menu screen to choose your desktop. What you choose running live will automatically transfer if/when installed. antiX is a very flexible linux distribution. You can run it live from a cd, live from a usb stick (with persistence ie changes are saved on reboot) as well as setting up a frugal-install from an internal or external hard drive. Of course, you can install to internal and external drives, sticks, cards etc. You can even run it live, add/remove applications, customize it, remaster it and then install. All your changes will carry over to install! antiX is based on Debian but is totally free of systemd ! It comes with a custom kernel, its own custom scripts and repository to enhance user experience. antiX can be used as a rolling release distro ie you should be able to keep your applications up to date by regularly upgrading. If you wish you can enable the Debian testing or unstable repositories and live on the bleeding-edge ! For those that prefer stability, keep to the Debian Stable/buster repositories. A further feature of antiX is that you can install kernels from a variety of sources including Debian, siduction, aptosid and liquorix. This is especially useful if you have a new box as newer hardware is more likely to be detected and work with newer kernels. Antix live iso download. Assuming a boot loader (such as Grub) is installed and configured correctly then just three files are needed in order to boot anti X Live Media (liveCD, LiveUSB, etc): vmlinuz. A compressed Linux kernel. initrd.gz. A small compressed file system that contains the linuxrc bootstrap script and a limited toolkit usually supplied by BusyBox. linuxfs. A complete Linux filesystem in a single compressed squashfs file . Traditionally this file was located at /antiX/antiX in the ISO file. The name has been changed to linuxfs so it is now found at /antiX/linuxfs . The official anti X ISO files will contain a symlink at /antiX/antiX that links to the linuxfs file. The boot loader handles finding the first two files so usually most of the pain and aggravation in the past has involved the simple task of finding the linuxfs file. The previous linuxrc script would scan through all possible devices and partitions, mounting each one and looking for a file at /antiX/antiX . Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a few extra seconds for a USB stick to show up as a device so people were often adding an extra delay with rootdelay=10 to give time for a LiveUSB device to settle. In addition, several extra ad hoc delays were embedded in the linuxrc script to try to address the settling problem. Booting was slower for everyone and was often unreliable. What’s New. The new script handles this all differently. First, we have a bootlabel option that allows you to boot off of a specifically labeled partition. This will make LiveUSB booting more reliable across different machines because the device name of a USB stick will changes depending on the number and type of internal drivers but the label stays the same. Next, regardless of how the boot device is specified (or if we have to scan for it), if we fail to find the linuxfs file the first time then we try retry more times, pausing one second between tries. The user doesn’t have to guess how large a rootdelay to use and they don’t have to wait watching a blank screen hoping for something to happen. We also scan SCSI hard drives in reverse alphabetical order. Since USB devices tend to have a higher letters ( /dev/sdb is higher than /dev/sda ) than internal drives, we usually find USB sticks faster when we are scanning and we will needlessly mount partitions on internal drives less often. Basic Booting Boot Options. All of the boot* options: bootdev , bootdir , bootlabel , and bootuuid can be abbreviated by replacing "boot" with "b". So bdev , bdir , blabel , and buuid are all valid parameters. In addition, blabel can be further abbreviated to blab . Basic booting involves specifying the boot device and specifying the name of the linuxfs file and the directory it is in. Specify the boot device. These parameters allow you to specify which device holds the squashfs file by device name, device label, or device UUID. If none of these options are specified then we revert to scanning all possible block devices. bootdev. the name of the device that holds the linuxfs file. This is similar to the old fromhd= parameter except this version allows you to omit the leading "/dev/" when specifying a device so bootdev=sdb1 does the same thing as bootdev=/dev/sdb1 . Abbreviation: blab=sdb1 . bootlabel. the label of the device that holds the linuxfs file. In other words bootlabel=LiveUSB does what fromhd=LABEL=LiveUSB was expected to do (but didn’t). Abbreviations: blabel , blab . bootuuid. the UUID of the device that holds the linuxfs file Abbreviation: cheat:buuid. The name and location of the linuxfs file. bootdir. The directory that holds the linuxfs file. The default is antiX which is fine for a LiveCD or LiveDVD but is inadequate for LiveUSBs and LiveHDs. The problem is that there can easily be more than one /antiX/antiX file or more than one /antiX/linuxfs file if someone has done any frugal installs in the past. The device scanning stops at the first device that has the desired directory/file even if it is the wrong one. If we simply include the antiX version number in the bootdir for LiveUSBs and LiveHDs then a number of potential problems are neatly avoided. The image_dir option is still available. It does the same things as bootdir but is deprecated. sqname. the name of the linuxfs file. The default is now linuxfs . It used to be antiX . There is usually no need to change this name but you are free to do so if you want. The image_name option is still available. It does the same things as sqname but is deprecated. sqext. the extension of the linuxfs file This is an extension that is tacked onto the end of the linuxfs name. so sqext=xx does the same thing as sqname=linuxfs.xx . Note: this option (as well as any extension on the linuxfs file name) is incompatible with remastering on filesystems that are restricted to 8.3 file names. Try, Try Again. There are now four different places you can add delays to the boot process. All of them default to zero except retry . Usually retry is the only one that is needed. Occasionally, rootdelay may be needed but delay and wait should almost never be needed. retry. Number of times to retry mounting the boot device, waiting one second between tries. This replaces rootdelay for many (but not all) cases. Usually, if the boot device is not found after the default number of retries, there is a configuration problem and no amount of retries will fix it. Default: 9. rootdelay. Delay this many seconds before looking for the initrd.gz file. If the Welcome to AntiX ! message is not seen, then try using rootdelay=10 or rootdelay=20 . If the welcome message is seen then there is no need for a rootdelay . delay. Wait this many seconds before starting to look for the linuxfs file. This should seldom, if ever, be needed. Usually, it is better (and faster) to rely on retry instead. Wait this many seconds after the bootstrap is complete before starting init.