anyone run linux from a flashdrive?

[OBLAMA2009]

is it sluggish? also does it literally enable you to take it to different hardware?

 

[TheELF]

Well there are fast flash drives and there are slow flash drives,there are linux distributions that are huge and there are very small ones that load up into memory and don't read from the drive after that.
So ubuntu on a slow flash will be a bit slower than normal because it's huge,wary puppy will be very fast because it's tiny.

Yes you can load it up wherever you want but it will be running in "safe mode" so only with very basic drivers,if you install drivers for your hardware than it might cause problems when booting on different hardware.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've done USB "live CD" boot. It was very fast, at least compared to a CD.

If you were to actually install it on a USB drive, then mileage may vary if you try it on another system. I cannot recall a single time where moving a hard drive from one machine to the other actually worked. Usually end up having to reinstall. The live installs are specially tuned. Not sure exactly how they work but I'm guessing they do some kind of hardware detection at startup and "install" the proper drivers on the fly so that it works on any or most systems. They probably cache lot of stuff in ram too as the disk is basically read only. Even USB I don't think if you save something it will save it as it loads it as a virtual CD basically. At least that's what I understand from it.

 

[TheELF]

Some distros use persistence,a file of adjustable size that will keep changes in between boots,ubuntu and puppy both have this.

 

[lxskllr]

If you were to actually install it on a USB drive, then mileage may vary if you try it on another system. I cannot recall a single time where moving a hard drive from one machine to the other actually worked.

I've never had it not work. My standard method of transferring a system to a new machine is to move the hd. I used to run Debian Sid from a flash drive to test it out. Disk access was slow of course, but it ran fine.

 

[schmuckley]

I've been playing with Lubuntu on an SD card..
I have Parted Magic and Lubuntu on SD cards/usb adapter..works fine.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I've run LM from a USB3 flash drive off of a USB3 port and was surprised at how well it performed. This was using the LM live file system as opposed to a normalized install to a flash drive.

 

[LurchFrinky]

It's definitely do-able. Don't expect it to perform as fast as a HDD, much less an SSD, but definietly usable. Boot times are abyssmal, but once everything is loaded into memory, you are good to go.

I have had mixed results with transferring to different boxes. I had a SUSE server install that transferred between an Opteron and a Pentium D system just fine, and I had a Buntu that didn't transfer between similar athlon systems. YMMV.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've never had it not work. My standard method of transferring a system to a new machine is to move the hd. I used to run Debian Sid from a flash drive to test it out. Disk access was slow of course, but it ran fine.

All the times I've tried it would not boot. Either get some kind of error, or just black screen of death. Not too long ago I tried it with my Kubuntu install. I figured I'd have good luck because it was a similar motherboard (same make) but no go. Would get grub then just black. Then it would just freeze there.

Most of the other times I'd just get the CTRL+D error screen. Probably sata controller related because the controller is different than last machine I'm guessing.

Even doing a P2V, I've never had any luck. End up having to rebuild a new VM. Even if going from one VM platform to the other. Windows is not really any better though, especially vista and up, I find they're very particular in the way they boot and very small changes can break the whole sequence.

 

[Gillbot]

Damn small Linux works well.

 

[ultimatebob]

I've installed CentOS on a CompactFlash card once. It worked, but it was slow as well.

 

[VinDSL]

I always carry a full install of Peppermint OS, on a 4GB bootable USB thumb drive with persistence.

Takes a minute or two to boot on most machines, but I've never run across a machine that it wouldn't perform adequately on. Drives IT departments crazy, BTW. They can't figure out what's going on. So, caveat emptor, if you're running a Linux session over someone's winders network or whatevs.

The whole trick to it, IMO, is figuring out how to boot this_or_that machine from a USB port. All computers handle this quite differently in BIOS.

It easy to do a full install to a bootable USB key with persistence -- but, it does require two USB thumb drives. Boot from the first Live USB drive. Then, install the OS to the second USB drive, just as you would to a HDD/SSD drive. Simple pimple!

I might also mention, some Linux OSs run hideously slow from a USB drive. I tried many, many OSs before settling on Peppermint OS. Just saying...

 

[BirdDad]

the flash drive I used was very fast. It is rated for 243MBps read and 190MBps write. I know that is not anything to brag about since SSDs saturate the full 6Gbps BW.

 

[KlokWyze]

I have a persistent installation of CentOS on a newer flash drive I use for testing h/w. Boots fast and is compatible with almost every x86 & x86_64 computer I attempt to boot from.

 

[ninaholic37]

As with others I always keep a Linux distro (Slacko 5.7) on a USB Flash drive (512MB) in my pocket in case I want to boot into a laptop from it and repartition/reformat/install a new OS/troubleshoot. From what I can tell, booting this really old Flash stick in a USB 2.0 slot is just as fast (or maybe even faster) than putting it the 5400rpm hard drive, but I normally do both anyway (using the USB to install itself to the hard drive) since it's so tiny and easy to set up.

 

[Crusty]

All the times I've tried it would not boot. Either get some kind of error, or just black screen of death. Not too long ago I tried it with my Kubuntu install. I figured I'd have good luck because it was a similar motherboard (same make) but no go. Would get grub then just black. Then it would just freeze there.

Most of the other times I'd just get the CTRL+D error screen. Probably sata controller related because the controller is different than last machine I'm guessing.

Even doing a P2V, I've never had any luck. End up having to rebuild a new VM. Even if going from one VM platform to the other. Windows is not really any better though, especially vista and up, I find they're very particular in the way they boot and very small changes can break the whole sequence.

You probably only needed to re-run grub-install on the new system(from a chrooted setup tho). You most likely had a mismatch between the order of your devices that Grub was using compared to what the BIOS was reporting. /dev/sda on one system will not always be /dev/sda on the next system when you move a disk between them. Disk UUID's were supposed to solve this problem though.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

i tried this and it works fast enough imo, but there doesnt appear to be a way to save your package manager updates, is there?

 

[lxskllr]

i tried this and it works fast enough imo, but there doesnt appear to be a way to save your package manager updates, is there?

What's "this"? If it's a *buntu, you can set persistence. Probably a way to do it with other distros too, but the easy tools work with *buntu.