NTLUG | BP-trryhend / Billix - A Sysadmin's Swiss Army Knife browse

Created by Terry Henderson on August 26, 2008, at 01:28 PM

I tried billix out and works like a charm. It's easy to install and use.
Billix is a bootable linux OS that fits on a 256MB thumb drive, (it runs on DSL Linux).

On my first test run I was happy to see that it had no problems with the wireless NIC on my laptop and connected to the internet just fine.

The current billix 0.23 contains the following:
Damn Small Linux 4.2.5
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS netinstall
Ubuntu 7.10 netinstall
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS netinstall
Fedora 8 netinstall
CentOS 5.1 netinstall
CentOS 4.6 netinstall
Debian Etch netinstall
Debian Sarge netinstall
Memtest86 memory-checking utility
Ntpwd Windows password changing utility
DBAN disk wiper utility

Installation procedure requires install-mbr (part of the mbr package on Ubuntu or Debian, needed for some USB drives) and syslinux (from the syslinux package on Ubuntu or Debian, required to create the bootsector on the USB drive).

To install billix, just untar http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=billix&filename=billix-0.23.tar.gz&use_mirror=osdn into the root directory of a 256MB or larger thumb drive and run commands install-mbr -p1 <device> and syslinux -s <device/partition>

Like this:
install-mbr -p1 /dev/sdc
syslinux -s /dev/sdc1
(where /dev/sdc is your thumb drive) (Make sure you get it right, lest you hose up your system :)

[Screenshot - Boot Menu Options]:

I have yet to try it but would be fun to re-arrange or add new capabilities [as we all have thumb drives far larger than 256M now]. To expand Billix to support other Linux distributions: "Download the distro you want. Copy the necessary kernel and initrd to the directory where you put the contents of the USB tarball, taking care to rename any files if there are files in that directory with the same name. Copy any compressed filesystems that your new distro may use to the USB drive (for example, Knoppix has the KNOPPIX directory, and Puppy Linux uses PUP_XXX.SFS). Then, look at the boot configuration for that distro (it should be in isolinux.cfg). Take the necessary lines out of that file, and put them in the Billix syslinux.cfg file, changing filenames as necessary. Optionally, you can add a menu item to he boot.msg file. Finally, run syslinux -s <device>, and reboot your system to test out your newly expanded Billix." Back to Site Blogs