Tue Jan 07, 2014 8:09 pm
fsmithred wrote:A usb thumb drive IS an external usb drive. It's just smaller and solid state instead of spinning disks.
fsmithred wrote:On a live-cd or usb, the operating system's filesystem is stored inside a file named filesystem.squashfs. When you run the live system, it gets unpacked from that file. You can't change what's inside that file - the system is read-only. If you set up full persistence, you can edit system files or install software, but none of those changes get applied to what's in filesystem.squashfs. Instead, the edited or added files are stored on the persistent partition (or loopback file), and the operating system knows to use those files instead of the originals from the CD image. If you install a lot of extra software, you could fill up your persistent volume.
So there may be some advantage to using a live system. If you get rooted, or if you screw up your configurations, you can always boot into the original system that came from the live-cd, and you could even wipe the persistent files and start over (from the point of having a read-only system on the media.) You need to use fat32 for the first partition if you're running a live system and using syslinux boot loader. Other partitions don't have to be ext2, but we recommend that for thumb drives because there will be more space and fewer writes to the drive with a non-journaled file system. In theory, it should last longer that way. (I've never heard of anyone counting how many times they could write to a stick before killing it, but I suspect it's fewer times than the manufacturer claims.)
fsmithred wrote:A four year old machine should have a way to select the boot device. It might be F8 (Dell), F12 (I forget - maybe HP) or Esc (my Foxcon motherboard) or some other key. Failing that, you could probably go into the bios and mess with the boot devices and boot order, but that can sometimes get ugly with multiple drives. I've got four internal drives, and I've screwed up the order several times and couldn't boot correctly until I straightened it out.
fsmithred wrote:And about "the three options". There are more options. You can read about them in the debian-live manual (or maybe it's called the live-build manual) and maybe in man live-boot. Do that when you're ready to experience information overload.
Tue Jan 07, 2014 10:19 pm
Wed Jan 08, 2014 10:50 pm
mkdir /usb_mountpoint/extlinux
extlinux -i /usb_mountpoint/extlinux
cp -a /usb_mountpoint/isolinux/* /usb_mountpoint/extlinux/
cp -a /usb_mountpoint/extlinux/isolinux.cfg /usb_mountpoint/extlinux/extlinux.conf
Thu Jan 09, 2014 5:35 am
golinux wrote: So asking again . . .why use this script instead of a regular full-blown installation? I'd appreciate knowing the pros and cons. I'm thinking if I unplug my internal drives, I'd get a clean full-system install on the disk-driven usb that would boot without interfering with internal grub (or windoze MBR) if usb is the first boot device.
Thu Jan 09, 2014 11:16 am
Thu Jan 09, 2014 3:24 pm
Thu Jan 09, 2014 3:37 pm
Thu Jan 09, 2014 4:16 pm
fsmithred wrote:@golinux:
What nadir said. I use the live-usb for troubleshooting and for any computing I do on someone else's computer. The live image is significantly smaller than a regular install, but that may not be so important, now that 32 and 64GB thumb drives are available.
Thu Jan 09, 2014 8:10 pm
Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:03 pm
I just want to find a way to give a friend Linux with persistent capabilities to play on without messing with his Windows (xp and 7) MBR in any way. Trying to set up a dual - actually triple - boot with winders on someone else's machine terrifies me. I'm hoping this can be an easy and 'safe' solution.
It would be good to be able to view the menu that came with the iso when you're editing the menu you're going to use. If both open in a text editor, it might be confusing, but if one opened in a text editor, and the other opened in a yad/zenity text-info box, you could copy/paste from the info box to the editor. Does that sound reasonable or crazy?