Instructions on how to use the Absolute Live USB file on Linux


TAR file available for download

From Sourceforge

From Slackware.uk: AbsoluteLive-20220825.tar.xz

From Absolute Home: AbsoluteLive-20220825.tar.xz

• Will only work on bios set to boot non-AHCI. Legacy. This is a limitatiion of the Linux Live Kit I used to create it. Make sure any bios SATA settings are legacy/ata, legacy ROM enabled, boot legacy before AHCI, etc.


• Does NOT feature an install option. This will run Absolute from the USB stick so you can check out the features,
  -- but you would need to download the install ISO if you would like to get Absolute on your hard drive.

Save the zip somewhere safe and then we will get the USB stick ready...

There are plenty of tools and command-line options for prepping the USB stick. I will show you the steps here using gparted:

1) Get your USB stick ready, I format mine to ext4.

While usin gparted, below, I also happened to put a label of "AbsoluteLive" on there. But a label is not required.
[By the way -- we don't format the usb to the usual FAT32, because we will later want to execute a script from the stick, and FAT32 won't allow us to set the executable bit. So cha-cha, we plan ahead!]





Then I clicked on "ADD",
Then the green checkmark to "Apply All Action"



Then you gotta click "APPLY",
And finally you should end up with a mounted ext4 partition, on what shows here as /dev/sdf1,
your path may be different -- Pay Attention.


Most Linux operating systems will mount USBs with the execute bit off... So I unmount the newly-formatted USB stick, then remount it with upped permissions.
rom a command prompt it looks like so:

"umount /dev/sdf1"
"mount -o rw,exec /dev/sdf1 /mnt/memory"

Or you can simply unmount in gparted,


THEN run the mount command, getting that exec bit in there ;-)
"mount -o rw,exec /dev/sdf1 /mnt/memory"



Now we are ready to use the USB stick. We have to copy the zip to the USB...
(I had downloaded the TAR to /tmp)
"tar -xf /usr/src/AbsoluteLive-20220825.tar.xz --strip-components=1 --directory /mnt/memory"



Inflating takes a while,
wait, wait, wait...




If you peek into /mnt/memory/Absolute/boot
you would see a bunch of files, including bootinst.sh

Which you would want to run.
"/mnt/memory/Absolute/boot/bootinst.sh"

If you CD to /mnt/memory/Absolute/boot,
"./bootinst.sh"



hat command will copy syslinux and make the USB bootable.
Takes a few minutes -- then looks like:


At this point, the USB stick is ready to rock-N-roll.

Initial login for LIVE USB:
User: "root" password: "root"