noCD? |boot from usb| Sabayon Linux

I had a pen-drive lying around, and so I decided to try out a new distribution of linux, Sabayon Linux.

Why Sabayon?

• On a base install, everything is there and just works perfectly
• For a newbie, the hard part is often getting playback codecs, well, Sabayon has them pre-installed
• Sabayon has focused on the base theme too, it looks great
• Entropy, their package manager, is really awesome, ‘man entropy’ to see more

Let’s mount and copy the contents of the live image, it can be downloaded here. As super user, do

mkdir /media/sabayon
mount -o loop /path/to/iso/file /media/sabayon

Plug in you pen-drive, wait for the device to settle down first, then copy whatever is important to you from the pen-drive to a hard-disk, and format it after you’ve successfully backed up your previous data

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdyx

Replace sdyx as per your needs, i. e. the partition where you will be booting the live image from, in my case it was sdc1. You can choose any filesystem type you want to, but let’s just stick to ext3 for now.
Now copy the contents of the live image which you previously mounted to this drive after mounting it

mkdir /media/target
mount /dev/sdyx /media/target
cp -r /media/sabayon/* /media/target/

The parameter ‘-r’ indicates that it should copy recursively, and not just the files present in the top level directory
Now we’ll need to setup that device to boot correctly, you may not want to end up with a few errors and be done with it, do you?

for grub version 2 onwards
skip to the older grub version section

Add the following to your grub.cfg(/boot/grub/grub.cfg)

menuentry "Sabayon GNU/Linux Live USB" --class sabayon --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
insmod ext2
set root='(hdX,Y)'
linux /boot/sabayon root=/dev/ram0 aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot looptype=squashfs max_loop=64 loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon vga=791 console=tty1 quiet music -- 
initrd /boot/sabayon.igz

for grub versions older than grub 2
Add the following to your menu.lst(a. k. a. /boot/grub/grub.conf)

title Sabayon GNU/Linux Live USB
root (hdX,Y)
kernel /boot/sabayon root=/dev/ram0 aufs init=/linuxrc cdroot looptype=squashfs max_loop=64 loop=/livecd.squashfs splash=silent,theme:sabayon vga=791 console=tty1 quiet music -- 
initrd /boot/sabayon.igz

Replace hdX,Y with the disk partitioning layout following the grub standards. In my case, it was hd1,1
Reboot, and your all set, make sure you press and hold the ‘Shift’ key(for older grub versions, the ‘ESC’ key) so that it shows you the menu, then get down the list, and press ‘enter’
You may also optionally choose to install grub on that device, but so far I only got to getting the grub directories installed there

Now you can explore the power of Sabayon Linux, have fun!
_{If you come across any problems, comment and I would love to resolve your issue}