Firstly, I'm a complete newbie at this so I'm probably missing something blindly obvious only a muppet wouldn't know this - but I would really appreciate being nudged in the correct direction on this one.

Basically, I've created a minimal install of Debian onto a USB key and duly followed the instructions here -> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Howto/Custom_Install . Now that works fine and I'm pretty happy with the results and negiotated the various problems ok. But with my minimal install I want install say fluxbox and some other odds and ends. I do this using 'sudo aptitude update' and 'sudo aptitude install fluxbox wdm xorg' and this works great. The problem is that when I turn the machine off these features / libraries / binaries are no longer on the machine although I'm explictly setting the 'persistent' flag in the Grub boot list thingie.

Do I have to download these libraries separately and place them onto the USB image (and if so, how and where) or I am missing something about the Grub Boot loader, how the 'persistent' flag is used, or something else?

Thank you in advance

I haven't tried installing on a thumb drive before (maybe I will now), but it appears that this type of install has two types of persistent: persistent /home and persistent /.

If you only set it up with persistent /home, then any program installs you do will be lost. The only things that will keep are changes to configurations and files in the /home directory.

If you set up a persistent /, then the entire filesystem is mounted read-write and your changes to installed programs should also be saved.

This should help.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/what-is-persistent-linux/

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/how-to-...-rw-loop-file/


The Debian Custom install you used, discusses different persistent modes as well as the use of the casper-rw file.. which is touched on a bit in the links I've posted as well..

Hope that helps.

Firstly thanks to you both - it seems that the problem was that I wasn't setting the label 'live-rw' to the partition in order to make it persistable. Apparantly 'home-rw' can also be used to just make the /home dir persistable.

Things you learn huh?

Without wishing to threadjack - I'm pretty established Windows Developer (C# / VB.NET) and looking on using Linux as an alternative and more flexible platform - apart from the obvious move of going to Mono is that a particular wise idea and do any of you have any experiences or suggested learning routes either on Mono or say Python?

Cheers