Comments on: Tutorial – Installing Linux to a USB memory Stick

By: Jaime

Jaime — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:54:46 +0000

@Hector
Exactly the same thing happened to me. BTW, virtualizing Windows from a USB with Ubuntu sounds interesting.
@Leoboulton&@Rob
I have installed Ubuntu on a 4GB USB and I have had no major issues running it on many different laptops. The only thing is that Skype might not work properly on some (as usual), but graphics and audio are usually fine. Install Dropbox and u will have all files synchronized!

I am trying to install Ubuntu on an encrypted partition (for work) in a 16GB USB. I am struggling with the guided partitioning of Ubuntu. How would you recommend to install Ubuntu in a similar way as u did with Fedora?

PS: I have NO CD drive and I run only windows on my laptop since partitioning it is not an option (long story).

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:14:48 +0000

@Leoboulton
Regarding the graphics drivers – Fedora 13 does a better job than 12 at automatically configuring graphics support without an xorg.conf file. I definitely recommend that you do not setup any proprietary drivers (e.g. nvidia) because you won’t get a successful X server when you’re not using one of their chipsets. Just let Fedora work it out.

And yes – I use my USB installation for lots of things, it’s in my pocket just now. I use it to recover Linux PC’s (including my own), booting corrupt Windows installations to extract important user files, and when using friends laptops when I don’t want to use their virus ridden OS’s. If you use Fedora 13, you’re likely to have access to most wireless chipsets with the 2.6.31 kernel, too.

My only advise is not to update software on it. It’ll use most of your persistent storage, leaving no room for user documents like videos. My USB installation is Fedora 12, and have no problem leaving it this way for a couple of years.

By: Leoboulton

Leoboulton — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:30:50 +0000

Great Idea. I was trying to achieve something similar with the Live USB installation, when I bumped into your post. My goal is to have my portable Linux desktop in a USB and that I can boot in may different machines.
However, with your method, it seems like drivers will be an issue…. hoave you experienced any issues with that? drivers changing constantly when moving from system to system?
I like the idea of hosting all my data in the Internet cloud (i.e. hosted email, hosted docs, delicious.com bookmarks, and even leverage something like Dropbox for storing some files) and have a “netbook – OS” without the netbook.

By: Jay

Jay — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:12:36 +0000

Hi, is persistence possible in this solution

By: Héctor

Héctor — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:25:56 +0000

Don’t worry about the grub, I am not that rookie about installing linux in computers I’ve been using ubuntu constantly for the past 2 years, however I am kinda new to install into USBs. My computer, where I am doing the process, has one single hard drive which is divided into vista partition for the system, main partition for the files and some unallocated space I was planning for Ubuntu or my long trying of not so friendly slackware. But since I only used this computer for very few things and my laptop for everything I left it that way. Now that my laptop is dead and my final exams and projects at the turn of the corner I need to manage and take my files and code with me. That is why I’ve been trying to virtualize xp into a usb (since I need visual studio), but being unable/insecure/unusable as it seems to be I am trying to carry ubuntu (or any other disto I can) into the usb and virtualizing xp just for visual studio. I will try now your instructions as it says and will unplug my HD to make sure I don’t lost the info for my homeworks and projects. Will keep you posted.

Best regards.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:04:19 +0000

Hi Hector,
It’s unfortunate that the install affected your PC’s hard drive – it seems you have to be extra careful using the GUI installer to deselect all hard drives, leaving only your (unmounted) USB stick selected. Anyway, so the grub has been installed to your PC’s mbr.. Going forward I’m happy to help if I can, but need to clarify one or two things. If you boot from your hard drive without the USB stick inserted, does it pop up with the grub command line interface? I’m guessing so, but may be wrong. If so, just a few commands using the grub command line will fix your grub config, and allow you to boot. Just a few things I need to know first of all… how many hard drives do you have? And on these, how many operating systems do you have? and within each hard drive, how many partitions? The reason for this is because the last thing we want to do is install grub onto, lets say, a Windows partition – it will break that too. But don’t worry, I’ve recovered grub in the past so let me know your setup and we’ll take it from there. Next, yes – you can access ntfs partitions by default now in recent distro releases – which is good news! The benifit of having the ntfs partition is so that it can carry your files to a Windows system to read/write data to your USB stick. If you’re never going to use that partition though, then I suggest ext3 across the whole USB stick – be good to your Linux install with all the space you can give it. If you are too tight with the OS disk space, this will cause issues with, for example, temporary files. For example if you’re doing a distro upgrade (to Jaunty when it is released), it will need to store the packages first of all (in /tmp I think), then install. So be as generous as you can.

Thanks.

By: Hector

Hector — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:53:47 +0000

Hi!

I’ve been trying to do these but when I tried at Ubuntu it made my computer unable to boot without the USB stuck to it because it installed grub into the pc’s MBR. How can I avoid these? And by the way, is it possible to access the NTFS partition from the Linux distro? I really want the whole USB space.