Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

ohnonot · 2016-09-04 10:55:25

I would like to have a Linux installation on a USB stick, with persistence of some kind.
meaning, i can install + uninstall Software, change configuration, and store files.
i think the usage scenario is pretty obvious - it has to work on a range of unknown hardware.
things havbe to Just Work, esp. light office tasks and media playback (browser playback is not important).
if the stick can still be used as storage under windows, that would be a bonus.
encryption would be important.

tl;dr: it seems this isn't as easy as i thought. any recommendations? mind, i don't like one of those where you are always root. apart from that, everything goes? preferably a dedicated distro. i thought those exist.

1.
I tried to simply install bunsenlabs to the usb stick, it did require some additional grub.cfg editing, but worked in the end.
worked quite ok, actually, but: using the stick as a hard drive is sometimes so slow, it freezes + becomes unusable.
mind, this is a normal no name cheapo usb stick, not faster and not slower than any other no name cheapo usb stick.

2.
I tried Porteus with their build system - i never even managed to boot to a graphical desktop. tried 2 different builds, tried 2 CDs, and always i get to the bootloader screen, it starts booting, and ends with some particular kernel panic. i did check the checksums. unfortunately i could only try it on my desktop because my netbook has no CD player.

3.
I tried to install Xubuntu 16.04.1 with this - surprisingly, it worked beyond grub, started booting, then said "medium /dev/sr0 not found" (that's a cdrom drive) or sth like that. duh. gave up on that.

4.
Right now I am trying slitaz which i have always liked, but there's something weird going on. they have a stable release from 2012, and weekly rolling builds (unstable? it is unclear) - and nothing in between. even the weekly rolling uses a 3.2.x kernel. the wiki/docs are vast and chaotic. the kernel has problems both on my 2016 motherboard and my 2010 notebook (no sound, no opensource grahic drivers, only fallback) and also the persistence is working only half. i am investigating, but maybe slitaz is not suitable or too experimental for my needs?

5.
there seems to be a few dedicated applications to build one yourself, but they only work on either ubuntu or windows. seriously. unetbootin is currently broken on archlinux.

also in many cases i see no clear differentiation between a live medium/distro, or live with persistence, or an actual usb install.
either i'm missing something, or website maintainers are simply using the term "Live USB" for everything.

at least 2 distros - porteus and slitaz - seem to recommend that the best way of creating a usb with persistence is to first boot the live medium from cd, then use that to create a usb with persistence. i'm ok with that, but so far it has only worked with slitaz, and there only partly.

Last edited by ohnonot (2016-09-04 11:02:31)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-09-04 12:17:23

I would recommend using Alpine Linux in "diskless" mode.

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#Basics

This allows for a backup file containing any persistent information; this can be placed on the USB stick along with the system.

Full guide here:
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Create_a_Bootable_USB

It uses a recent (4.4 series) grsec-patched kernel with vanilla kernel images available from the repositories.

I think it makes a great desktop but it is similar to Arch in that it requires some preconfiguration:
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpin … -xorg-base

Head_on_a_Stick · 2016-09-04 12:28:00

^ It would be very slow for I/O operations unless a USB3 stick was used, surely?

I tried that with #! and on a USB2 stick it was almost unusable in respect of package installations and (especially) upgrades.

PackRat · 2016-09-04 23:50:07

Void can apparently be installed to a USB - I've haven't tried to do this though.

damo · 2016-09-05 00:44:28

And there is Puppy Linux, which was specifically built to be very light and portable.

Snap · 2016-09-05 07:24:05

Why not antiX? AFAIK it does what you need ROOTB.

It's been a while since I don't install the basic version to avoid the too many WMs/Desktops mess included by default. If I remember correctly it has about the same live functions as the other two. Pretty versatile in that respect.

mcarni · 2016-09-05 09:50:54

have a look at Tiny Core Linux

it is not straight out of the box, but it served me very well in the past.

M

Irulan · 2016-09-06 01:28:36

Don't forget Slax
It's really quite good.
-H

ohnonot · 2016-09-06 17:19:17

^ slax is good. somehow it manages to run kde on my outdated & underpowered netbook!
but unfortunately it runs as root, just like puppy linux. and as much as i like both these distros, that's a dealbreaker.
also slax doesn't seem to have any sort of community, heck, i couldn't even find out how to contact the dev.

but thanks for all suggestions so far, some seem worthy of closer inspection, which of course wil take its time...

Irulan · 2016-09-06 19:28:32

FWIW, Slax isn't really meant to be installed. As for community, it's slackware. Running as root is a pretty bad idea... and as far as contacting the dev, he's got some off-the-wall personal views (if you've ever seen his original website/rants)

That being said, it was pretty simple to create a liveCD with reminna/rdp installed which ran on an old PII so I could remote desktop into my work PC for development.
-H

Irulan · 2016-09-06 19:31:19

BTW... Did you see this (a while back) with DSL after Hurrican Katrina?
http://thinclient.org/archives/2005/10/ … ic_we.html
-H

ohnonot · 2016-09-07 06:50:09

^ it is interesting that when someone asks for a distro on a usb, many people assume old hardware.
this is not the case for me.
i understand that the lighter the distro, the easier/better it is to run from a usb stick, but my typical usage scenario is other people's windows laptops - so rather new than old.

portable usb distro with persistence is the topic of this thread.

Snap wrote:

Why not antiX? AFAIK it does what you need ROOTB.
It's been a while since I don't install the basic version to avoid the too many WMs/Desktops mess included by default. If I remember correctly it has about the same live functions as the other two. Pretty versatile in that respect.

thanks, antix indeed has that feature, if not right ootb.
the process seems to be (as was with slitaz):
1 create a live bootable medium the usual way
2 start a dedicated usb installer to install to another usb

for antiX:
Menu => Control Centre => Disks => antiX2usb

this works good so far, i have installed antix-16-386-base, which means 3 wms (jwm, fluxbox, herbstluftwm) and 2 filemanagers (rox, spacefm), with full persistence.
it uses 4.6GiB of a 15GiB usb stick (i could have chosen much less), and i formatted the rest as fat32. the idea is to still be able to use the usb stick's fat32 partiton on windowscomputers. we will see.

i'd like to set up encryption for /home, not sure if and how, but for now i'm getting somewhere.

PS:
it seems that slitaz and antix and, afaics puppy as well, are using a different approach to installing to a usb, as compared to simply running $distro installer on the usb. certainly for a reason.

Snap · 2016-09-07 09:37:35

Yes, antix (base or full) is a bit too "overcrowded" of WMs, file managers and terminal emulators IMO. That's why the core version seems to be a nicer option, but being quite barebones it involves way more preparation customization than base, which is much simpler. Just dropping it into into a flash drive and good to go.

unklar · 2016-09-07 12:17:34

antiX has no systemd therefore = for me an exclusion criterion.

Irulan · 2016-09-07 13:07:28

ohnonot wrote:

^ it is interesting that when someone asks for a distro on a usb, many people assume old hardware.
snip

I didn't think that at all. I just thought the article was interesting.
As far as using Linux on another person's laptop, that's exactly what Slax was targeted for.
-H

ohnonot · 2016-09-07 16:51:03

ok, sorry about that. i just clicked the article, saw that it doesn't really cover what i'm trying to achieve here, and closed it again... didn't really read it.

Snap wrote:

Yes, antix (base or full) is a bit too "overcrowded" of WMs, file managers and terminal emulators IMO.

oh, i meant that 3 wms and 2 fms is not so much. and there's only roxterm, on the base version.
anyhow, however you define crowded. it's true, there's a surprising amount of apps for such a small .iso, but they don't take much space.
i think they are making a point of showing people how lightweight you can go and still have feature richness and userfriendliness. or something like that.

cloverskull · 2016-09-08 00:54:48

I have distro-on-an-external-USB3-hard-drive and it works well. I use it to boot my macbook. I (more or less) installed it by exposing the USB drive in virtualbox, treating the exposed USB drive like a traditional drive, and doing all post-configuration (wireless networking, for example) in the virtualized environment. An added fun-fact is that it's dead simple to use installation boot media to take care of chrooting your new persistent USB installation to configure UEFI.

I think USB flash drives are probably tough - I'm using sata/usb3 so for me it's not bad, but still not ideal. Are there any speedy drives you can use?

ohnonot · 2016-09-08 17:26:12

cloverskull, the currently used antiX, as well as e.g. slitaz and others, use a different approach to boot the live system into ram and add persistence to it. i don't know exactly how it works, but it's not the same as installing to usb as if it was a normal hard drive.
that magick allows for snappiness even when run from a usb 2.0 stick.

stevep · 2016-09-09 00:29:42

ohnonot wrote:

cloverskull, the currently used antiX, as well as e.g. slitaz and others, use a different approach to boot the live system into ram and add persistence to it. i don't know exactly how it works, but it's not the same as installing to usb as if it was a normal hard drive.
that magick allows for snappiness even when run from a usb 2.0 stick.

Well, yeah, the MX Linux variant uses the same thing. Basically, a LiveUSB with persistence has all the files on the drive still compressed with squashfs, the same as on a Live optical drive, so all you're doing is reading compressed data from the drive (pretty fast) and decompressing it on your computer. Nothing gets written to the squashfs file. All changes go into a persistence file in your RAM until you end that session, then it gets written to the persistence partition on the Live USB. Writing to a flash drive is much, much slower than reading from it.

When you do a true install to a flash drive, stuff gets written to it all the time when in use, which is really going to slow it down. Having to read uncompressed data from it adds some percentage of lag, too, but nothing compared to the writes.

You also have an option to start your AntiX or MX LiveUSB with or without persistence. There's also an option to start with systemd, but I think you need a real installed version to see that on the menu.

Last edited by stevep (2016-09-09 00:33:08)

ohnonot · 2016-09-09 06:02:05

stevep wrote:

You also have an option to start your AntiX or MX LiveUSB with or without persistence.

yes, the extremely configurable bootloader menu is a big plus when using this on the go.

#1 2016-09-04 10:55:25

Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#2 2016-09-04 12:17:23

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#3 2016-09-04 12:28:00

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#4 2016-09-04 23:50:07

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#5 2016-09-05 00:44:28

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#6 2016-09-05 07:24:05

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#7 2016-09-05 09:50:54

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#8 2016-09-06 01:28:36

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#9 2016-09-06 17:19:17

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#10 2016-09-06 19:28:32

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#11 2016-09-06 19:31:19

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#12 2016-09-07 06:50:09

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#13 2016-09-07 09:37:35

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#14 2016-09-07 12:17:34

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#15 2016-09-07 13:07:28

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#16 2016-09-07 16:51:03

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#17 2016-09-08 00:54:48

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#18 2016-09-08 17:26:12

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#19 2016-09-09 00:29:42

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

#20 2016-09-09 06:02:05

Re: Distro on a Stick, pretty Please!

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