Use a thumb drive for the home directory

Hi I was wondering if anyone here could help me. i am very new to programming. i have very limited resorces, computers internet access, money, time... These are things that I have consiterabley less of than most people! Yet I am in abondance of passion, patience, and determination! I have done a lot of research and I now have a dream. You have almost made what I am dreaming of!
I guess I have to give you some backround info on me to give you the full efect now. I don't know jack about windows, I was never allowed to have a computer cuz my mom worked on one all day and didn't wanna come home to see one. I got older and decided I was gonna have one, but I didn't have a dime to spare for one so I built one outta parts thrown away from thrift stores. I needed an os and hade no money so I found linux. Linux is all I know. It gets deeper than that but that's the short of it.
Now back to my dream... I want a portable learning to program environment, I want to use linux, I want to develope for linux, I want to learn to code in c++, I have many more spicific desires such as using anjuta as my IDE, developing gnome/gtk apps, using gedit when possable as apost to VIM, etc, you have addressed an amaising 99.99% of those conserns, however I hapen to be lucky enough to have a 250GiB Seagate External USB HD, and I was wondering if some one would be willing to help me (find or develope a way to) install a bootable version (to reside entirely) on my portable hd? Also I want to install backpack programmer as my primary os on my enternal hd on my home computer as it is the 16th generation of that thrift store junk built computer and it has a BIOS so old it does not support booting to USB. Also it only has a 10GiB HD and 256M RAM. Also I would like to be able to make updates or changes to either installation, and be able to 'sync' them, for lack of better words. And I would need to be able to install programs, save documents such as .cpp files, edit system files like /etc/fstab for example, and have those changes be persistant.
If you have any questions, comments, or answers, or if you would like to help me, or if you need help understanding my dream, and you have limited reapeves like me you can contact me at; binary.glitch@gmail.com thank you for your time.

P.S.
I am truley a biginner at coding, I've been compiling for years but only via ./configure | make | make install, and I didn't even know anything other than that's how you install programs, I didn't know that that was called compiling, or that it was part of programming. I've authored hello world, and some simple calculators, etc. But that's it. So super newbe. Also in some cases I may come off as a super duper newbe in linux as wall, this is because I wasn't trying to do anything other than write resumes, save pictures, play games (like not doom or anything, were talking tetris) I was just trying to compute like an aveage windows user, my first distro was RH9 it just worked outta the box for all my needs for years, and yes I compiled my apps, cuz I didn't know about rpms. I never bothered to think that there where groups of people on the net that helped each other witn linux. I never used a shell, unless I had to.
Did you know that you can download a tarball, save it to a floppy, move it to your computer, unpack/extract it with file roller, to a dir in / called /downloaded_programs, then open Nautilus, and navagate to /downloaded_programs, open the folder that contains you unpacked tarball, double click on the hammer & screw driver (aranged like cross bones) icon called configure, and watch the files jump around untill they stop for a while and you can see another icon just like the configure one called make, and I bet you can see where I'm going with this, the point is I'm so familler with the desktop enviro', that I found a way to complie tarballs in the GUI, without ever seeing the CLI or a terminal. I can do things with the linux desktop you didn't even know linux could do, on the desktop, in the command line, or other wise, yet you could lose me with some simple directions that a 3 month newbe could follow no prob. So be patient with me please.
When I say I don't know windows I mean I don't know windows. a couple years ago (as in close to 2) I had to have it explained to me that basicaly there is only one distro of windows (I was amazed by this idea) and that windows just changes names for it's version notation. Like I'm sorry if I get this wrong but it goes
windows 3.x = win_1.0
windows 95 = win_2.0
windows 98 = win_3.0
windows 98se = win_3.5
windows 2000 is 4.0
xp is 5.0
and vista is 6.0
while windows nt and ce are the "kind of's" in the windows only has one distro thing. Idk it's kind of wired if you ask me, many names one main distro with a couple branches, and the names are the version numbers? At any rate I don't get windows so please don't explain things to me in terms of windows.
Also note that 99% of the time when I'm on the web, I'm on my BlackBerry, like now... All this was typed on my bb. Sorry to get on such a big tangent, but it's stuff that answers a lot of questions that I get a lot when asking for this kind of help, I guess this whole shpeel is like the FAQ to me. Thank you all again for your time, and I appoligise for my misspellings, as spelling is not my nor my BlackBerry's strong points.

#include < binary_glitch > ^_^'

Through understanding we can lose ignorance and find...
Peace, Love, & Unity!

Comments

11 March 2007 - 4:30am — ghorthas

Hmm, how?

Show me what work you've done. Modified the bootscripts? Have you allowed for a user to select a home directory off of boot? That would make it possible for the home directory to be stored anywhere. We could possibly even allow the mounting of FTP. Image access your files from any computer with internet access and a live cd. Now I think that is a neat idea, and no other system is doing that.

11 March 2007 - 12:12pm — Daga

makehome.sh

On the live-cd, take a look at /usr/local/bin/makehome.sh. I haven't touched the script in a while because I've needed to test it more, so the version on your live-cd should be the same as mine. And the file /etc/rc.d/rc.mount has this little block at the end to mount the home directory on boot if one is found:

if [ $FINDHOME = 1 ]; then if [ -e $MOUNT/.backpacker ]; then mount -o remount,rw,exec $MOUNT mount --move /mnt/$MOUNT /home/user fi fi

17 June 2007 - 12:49am — Daga

Oops.

Looks like makehome.sh wasn't functioning correctly. It failed to copy over hidden files in the home directory to the thumb drive. Will have to fix this.

19 June 2007 - 1:15am — Daga

Fixed two bugs in this so far...

The makehome.sh script will now copy all the needed files. We'll have to work out something for the X.org pipe used when using Gnome. Also, 0/1 had been inverted in rc.mount, and that has been fixed.

So, we still have to copy the Xorg pipe somehow while keeping Xorg up, and it would be nice to build Jffs2 support into the kernel to make flash drives last longer. After that, we'll need documentation about mounting and formatting the thumb drive before running makehome.sh.

1 February 2009 - 2:43am — binary_glitch