Linux

48372 readers

2159 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

172

How to create a bootable Linux USB drive (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

76 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive's EFI.

[–] Anarchistcowboy 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I see people say this a lot and I have no experience with this but I wonder why you wouldn't use a USB nvme SSD enclosure it seems a lot easier and idk if running it over USB would limit the speed but it could preform better than a USB stick.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional "fix something up" or "take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do". A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.

Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it'll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt's sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.

[–] Hule 1 points 7 months ago

"persistent storage" is a thing.

But USB drives can't endure standard Linux for long. Too many logs and other files written all the time..