Add antiX 15 with persistence to Easy2Boot

The sample .mnu file Antix_13.2_Persistent.mnu shows you how to set up root or home persistence, but not both.

Here is a brief outline of how I made a root+home persistent antiX 15 installation on my Easy2Boot NTFS USB HDD



1. Download the antiX15 ISO (I used antiX-15-V_386.iso)

2. Drag-and-drop the ISO file onto the MPI_FAT32 Desktop shortcut and choose a larger partition size when prompted which allows for extra space. For instance, if you want 500MB for the root filesystem and 500MB for the home filesystem, add 1GB to the suggested size. Note that you cannot exceed 4GB for each filesystem, so the maximum that you can usefully add is 8GB.

3. Copy the antix .imgPTN file to your E2B USB drive (e.g. \_ISO\LINUX) and boot to it and run it to get to the CSM menu and then quit (or use the new Switch_E2B.exe app to switch to the new .imgPTN file)

4. Modify the boot config files on the new partition USB drive (add the text in red shown below)

\boot\syslinux\syslinux.cfg
LABEL live
    MENU LABEL antiX-15-V_386-full (30 June 2015) Persistent
    KERNEL /antiX/vmlinuz
    APPEND quiet splash=v disable_srv=LX from=hd,usb persist=hd,usb,r,h
    INITRD /antiX/initrd.gz

\boot\grub\grub.cfg
menuentry "antiX-15-V_386-full (30 June 2015) Persistent" {
set gfxpayload=text
linux /antiX/vmlinuz quiet splash=v disable_srv=LX from=hd,usb persist=hd,usb,r,h
initrd /antiX/initrd.gz
}

If you are only going to boot from USB and not a VM, then you can omit the ",hd" strings (the USB drive will appear as a hard disk if running under VBox+VMUB, so we need to add ,hd if booting from VBox).

5. Now boot to the CSM menu and use the  '1 BOOT from this drive (MBR mode)' menu option. You should now see the antiX boot menu

Note that the new parameters can be seen in the Boot Options box.

Choose the first boot option.

6. Once booted to the antiX desktop, use Control Center - Live - Setup live persistence  to create a Root and Home persistence filesystem:

                Root: Create Root Persistence        e.g. 500MB

                Home: Create Root Persistence      e.g. 500MB

For Config options, use semi-automatic (default) so you are prompted to save on exit.

7.  Now reboot again, you should be asked for a better password and persistence should be working. When you shutdown\reboot, you should be prompted to save any changes you have made.

To check if persistence is enabled, run the Control Center - Live - Setup live persistence utility and look at the status.

UEFI-booting

The grub.cfg file is used for UEFI booting. I found that although Root persistence seemed to work OK, the Home persistence seems to have a different 'user identity'. For instance, in MBR mode I could set a grey Desktop wallpaper, but when booting in UEFI-mode via Clover, I could set a red Desktop wallpaper - whenever I rebooted in MBR-mode, the grey wallpaper was loaded.

I am not sure why this happens!

Also, booting from this .imgPTN image using UEFI (not Clover) did not seem to work (just a black screen) - I tried UEFI-booting both from VBox and a real system (Asus Z87 Haswell PC) and both gave the same black-screen symptom, but booting via Clover on VBox worked.

antiX-15-V_x64-full.iso

I had similar issues with this on UEFI. Even UEFI-booting as an ISO under VBoxfailed (black screen).



See also antix MX-15.