Date de publication : 5 avr. 2016 00:20:42
After many months of trials and errors, thousands of pages read on the net and many discussions, I am glad to introduce you BeeKey.
It's a self-contained Aranym 1.02 + EasyAraMint installed on top of Ubuntu Mini Remix 15.04 (a terminal only distro weighting 300 MB) that boots straight into Aranym from an USB Key, with a persistent storage up to 4 GB. Total system weights less than 1.2GB.
It's a work in progress and it has been tested only on a few Macs (Macbook Pro from 2008, and MacPro from 2008) and PC (Intel NUC i5 from 2015). It should work on any machine but as the booting process is different for PC and Mac (MBR vs EFI), there are 2 different ways to install it and the key will boot only on a PC or a Mac, but not on both.
Video, sound, network… are setup automatically and should work out of the box with almost every hardware, except, WiFi, touchpads and 4K or retina screens which are too big to work in native resolution.
Boot time is quite short (1min the first time and 30sec after) and you don't feel any slowdown in the usage, as far as your USB key is USB3. USB2 is slower and the first boot will last 5 min, the others 1 min 20 sec. I strongly recommend using an USB3 key.
If you don't care having persistent storage and just want to try it without the possibility to save data, a 2GB USB key will be enough. The minimum USB key size recommended if you want persistence is 4 GB (1.2 GB for the system, 2.8 GB for the persistence), ideally a 8GB if you want to have the full 4GB of persistent storage. USB3 keys are generally 16GB or bigger, so you will lose half of the space with this standard install; we will see later on how to recuperate it with a second partition, but it's a more complicated story.
Hard drive install has not been tested yet but it should be feasible. Please read this link if you want to try the adventure, knowing that it will erase all the data on your hard drive.
Download the iso file : Obsolete
Enjoy,
Philippe