Hi All,

I'd like burn the Debian OS with XFCE on my laptop to USB for some of my friends to try. Many have them older equipment like mine that would benefit from this fairly light set up. The problem is that they, similarly to me, are not very fluent in Linux.

If anyone is willing to help that would be wonderful.

I've spent several hours Googling and haven't found what I need.

Where did you get stuck? Basically the steps are:

1) Download the iso file of you release you want on usb.
2) Connect the usb stick
3) Find it in the /dev folder. It's probably going to show as /dev/sdb or so.
4) Make sure the stick is not mounted. Umount if necessary using the umount command (as root)
4) Burn the iso onto the stick using the dd command as root.
where sdx can be e.g. sdb, or sdc, ... depending on where your stick is. Make sure not to put sdb1 or so.

And *be careful* to choose the right destination. If you choose the wrong device you might delete your hard drive! In case of doubt, ask here before issuing the above command. Again, you can cause serious damage to your system if you make a mistake.

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thank you Joe_2000,

Will this make an exact bootable duplicate of my laptop OS?

No this will just give you a live OS of the standard iso image. If you want to have a duplicate of your current install things will get a lot more complex. I personally wouldn't be able to give you instructions on that. I am not even sure it's possible at all.
Is that really what you want? Clone your install to usb? Or do you want to create a bootable live image of your distro with a certain package choice. That should be possible... though I did not try it myself, yet. Maybe start here:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Modify/CD

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Hmm, after another quick search I am thinking that maybe what you are looking for is called "remastering".

Found this article:
http://www.linuxforu.com/2011/05/how...-distribution/

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There was a remastersys specifically for Debian but it is no longer being developed for the reasons shown at the link below:

http://www.remastersys.com/

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You might want to look at something like Clonezilla, but it will make a restorable image of everything on the hard drive, so make sure you don't have personal files that you wouldn't want your friends to see included. You will probably want to customize user accounts etc. on the new machines once the image is loaded from Clonezilla.

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