Did you create LVM on the USB first and ran your installation? By the way, you did not mention how you got it to work in the first place. Did you just simply follow the Alien's scripts mentioned above?

If you want to dedicate a portion of your USB to the FAT32 partition, so you can dump certain "shared" files into that partition for use in Windows, do you have to place it at the beginning of the USB?

I like the idea that you have been proactive in minimizing the writes to the device itself, i.e. Firefox, but I don't understand why it is necessary to fiddle with slackpkg cache files! I mean, do they get modified often to the point that you had to actually move them to a shared memory device?

Thank you for sharing the list of installed packages. I too normally go down that daunting task of installing packages one by one which usually ends up causing headaches when some applications break due to the lack of presence of dependencies. But then again, you learn a few things in between.

Actually, you will be able to do that with a normal install on USB, as long as you don't use proprietary drivers for the graphics card. No need for a Live system. In fact, it is easier to adapt the system to a new machine when you have a normal install instead of a live one.

Very well, how can I go about installing a normal version on the USB where I can augment or remove applications as needed? Note, that I tend to have a minimum amount of packages (of course a light weight windows manager like Fluxbox would be more than enough).

P.S. Has anyone used LVM to perform their partitioning on the USB?

Just do it the same way you would do it when installing on an internal harddisk, just chose the partitions on your USB and install Lilo to the USB's MBR. Nothing difficult or magic about it. I would recommend to give your partitions labels when formatting (or do that afterwards with tune2fs) and then adapt your lilo.conf and fstab for using those labels, so that the install will work on different machines without mixing up partitions.

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Very well. I can give that a try.

But let me also ask, what is the main reason for people creating a live USB vs. normal? Is it because the former requires less write hits on the USB which increases the longevity of the drive? Would be advisable to compile kernels on a normal USB installation?

Actually I don't know. the only reason I can think of is that you have every time you boot your system in a predefined state, which is quite handy for a secure system for online banking, for example.

Possibly, but with the prices USB devices have nowadays I personally wouldn't call that a factor.

Same as above, but with todays machines with 4GB and more it shouldn't be a problem to do that in RAM (which I always do).

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Hmm... then I guess, in my case at least, there is little reason to go down the live route. I think with Moore's law in case of USB's, I am not banking on using a single stick for more than 2 or 3 years.

I'll give this whole thing a try this evening.

Some posts on this thread have pointed out that this is not a mystery, rather it is quite do-able. There are however lots of variations on how to do it, and that adds some confusion.

I have a way to do it. I call it Joe's Boot Disk (JBD). You can get it from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/joesbootdisk/

You can read about how it works at http://rosevearsoftware.com/products/jbd/

A JBD contains a Slackware kernel and sufficient libraries and modules to boot an (almost) ordinary Slackware installation on an internal or USB device.

I say "almost ordinary", because you need to use labels on the relevant partitions of the device you are booting and refer to those labels in the /etc/fstab. This is done with "LABEL=<label>" syntax instead of "/dev/<device>".

The JBD must meet your needs or it won't work. If you find a JBD that has a suitable kernel and file system type, then you can adopt the label that it uses.

Alternately, you can make your own JBD with the information and files I provide on my rosevear software website. Sadly, this isn't easy. I'm working on a newer method to address that lack.

-Joe

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First, a Live device allows you to boot always in a predefined environment. This means the Operating System does not degrade with use, nor do user misconfigurations survive reboot.

Secondly, a Live OS, when properly configured, does not leak data to the hard drive. This is important when dealing with security or critical information in a computer which is not secure (for example, you fear the inner drive could be seized by enemy forensics after you use it, thus allowing them to retrieve data). With a Live system, you can carry an encrypted drive and the Live OS, knowing you can boot, operate the encrypted drive and shutdown leaving no traces on the insecure inner drive.

Third, in most cases, making backups of the Live system gets extremely simplified.

Forth, if you have to deal with multiple "stupid" users that need to use a homemade appliance (whatever), and you need to distribute a consistent system for them, it is safe to distribute live media. Just make a remastered Live OS for them and distribute copies to them. No matter how stupid the users are, they won't easily break the system so badly that a reboot won't fix it. I found myself in the need to turn some laptops with a broken Windowses into multimedia playing centers, and I solved the issue remastering a Knoppix CD and installing a "frugal" Knoppix on the laptops.

Fifth, most live media uses compression technologies, so you can squeeze more software in them than in a usual install. Knoppix DVD, when uncompressed, makes for 9Gb or so.

I suppose there are more good reasons, but I don't want to think much more :-)

Live usb tend to mean created from a live cd. The live cd was adapted to run on a usb by some different tricks. The main part is still tends to be a compressed virtual filesystem where a lot of data might be stored in order to save space on a cd.

Since the usb drives and internal drives have changed over from the ide to the scsi we have always had the ability to install to a usb. What was needed was only two parts. One was a way to use the usb at boot and two was large enough flash drives. In the last maybe 5 years or so both have been available to use. A cheap 8G flash can be used to have almost any modern distro installed to it directly just as if it were a regular hard drive.

I have never understood the "copy to a CD, boot from the CD, and install to usb". If it's on a CD, installing to a usb drive is redundant, and you have to burn a new CD on each upgrade which defeats part of the reason for using a usb flash drive, and you are limited to 700MB. So I'm also going the try the alien et al links. I have used UNetBootin to create a bootable live image. It works fine. There is no Slackware option, so you have to download the Slackware ISO and point it there. I always prefer a "Slackware" solution though.

Edit: I just checked Slackbuilds.org and there is a slackbuild for unetbootin. It's version 565 though instead of the newest 575 so you will have to change the slackbuild if you want the newest version.

You can now find 32GB flash drives for under $20 US (2.0 not 3.0) so size limitations should not be a problem. Damn I'm windy today.

I wouldn't do it that way. I just would use the USB as a disk in Virtualbox. This way i don't have to burn disks. Also I can't see a limit to 700MB (I think you meant 700MB, not 700KB), at least not since the invention of the DVD.

To follow up...

I made and uploaded a new release. This release is a kit for making your own custom JBDs that boot Slackware 13.37.0. The kit includes a script that allows you to choose from two kernels and four file systems. It lets you specify any LABEL, and it burns the JBD for you on either CD-R or CD-RW media.

-Joe

There is another solution in order to obtain a persistent kde slackware on an usb stick. You can simply modify an usb slax this way:
Using a slackware 14.1 live dvd, upgrade or install (upgradepkg --install-new nameofpkg.txz) in the slax usb system, the following packages, to be able to use slackbuilds:
GConf-3.2.6-i486-1.txz
autoconf-2.69-noarch-1.txz
automake-1.11.5-noarch-1.txz
bison-2.7-i486-1.txz
expat-2.1.0-i486-1.txz
flex-2.5.37-i486-1.txz
glade3-3.8.3-i486-1.txz
glib2-2.36.4-i486-1.txz
gobject-introspection-1.36.0-i486-1.txz
gperf-3.0.4-i486-1.txz
gtk+-1.2.10-i486-5.txz
gtk+2-2.24.20-i486-1.txz
gtk+3-3.8.2-i486-2.txz
harfbuzz-0.9.16-i486-1.txz
icu4c-51.2-i486-1.txz
intltool-0.50.2-i486-1.txz
libarchive-3.1.2-i486-1.txz
libcroco-0.6.8-i486-1.txz
libglade-2.6.4-i486-4.txz
libidn-1.25-i486-2.txz
libxml2-2.9.1-i486-1.txz
libxslt-1.1.28-i486-1.txz
nettle-2.7.1-i486-1.txz
openldap-client-2.4.31-i486-2.txz
pango-1.34.1-i486-1.txz
peazip-3.1-i686-1as.txz (this one is not in slackware dvd but ark will not work so....)
perl-Bit-Vector-7.3-i486-1dj.txz
perl-Sub-Uplevel-0.22-i486-2dj.txz
perl-extutils-pkgconfig-1.15-i486-1gv.txz
perl-gtk2-1.249-i486-1tjb.txz
perl-pango-1.224-i486-1tjb.txz
pil-1.1.7-i486-4.txz
pycairo-1.8.10-i486-2.txz
pygobject-2.28.6-i486-2.txz
pygtk-2.24.0-i486-1.txz
soprano-2.9.0-i486-1.txz
vlc-2.1.4-i486-1alien.txz (not in the slackware dvd...)
alsa-lib-1.0.27.2-i486-1.txz
alsa-utils-1.0.27.1-i486-1.txz
alsa-oss-1.0.25-i486-1.txz
autofs-5.0.7-i486-2.txz
automoc4-0.9.88-i486-1.txz
cmake-2.8.12-i486-1.txz
gccmakedep-1.0.2-noarch-2.txz
font-arabic-misc-1.0.3-noarch-1.txz
font-bh-lucidatypewriter-100dpi-1.0.3-noarch-1.txz
font-bh-lucidatypewriter-75dpi-1.0.3-noarch-1.txz
font-bh-ttf-1.0.3-noarch-1.txz
font-bitstream-type1-1.0.3-noarch-1.txz
font-util-1.3.0-i486-1.txz
font-xfree86-type1-1.0.4-noarch-1.txz
libXfont-1.4.6-i486-1.txz
mkfontdir-1.0.7-noarch-1.txz
mkfontscale-1.1.1-i486-1.txz
showfont-1.0.4-i486-1.txz
terminus-font-4.38-noarch-1.txz
xfontsel-1.0.5-i486-1.txz
xlsfonts-1.0.4-i486-1.txz
gcc-4.8.2-i486-1.txz gcc-go-4.8.2-i486-1.txz
gcc-g++-4.8.2-i486-1.txz gcc-java-4.8.2-i486-1.txz
gcc-gfortran-4.8.2-i486-1.txz gcc-objc-4.8.2-i486-1.txz
gcc-gnat-4.8.2-i486-1.txz gccmakedep-1.0.2-noarch-2.txz
gettext-tools-0.18.2.1-i486-2.txz
glibc-2.17-i486-7.txz glibc-solibs-2.17-i486-7.txz
glibc-i18n-2.17-i486-7.txz glibc-zoneinfo-2013d-noarch-7.txz
glibc-profile-2.17-i486-7.txz
gnu-efi-3.0s-i486-1.txz gnuplot-4.6.3-i486-1.txz
gnupg-1.4.15-i486-1.txz gnutls-3.1.16-i486-1.txz
gnupg2-2.0.22-i486-1.txz qca-gnupg-2.0.0_beta3-i486-1.txz
clucene-2.3.3.4-i486-2.txz kwebkitpart-1.3.2-i486-1.txz
kdewebdev-4.10.5-i486-1.txz
curl-7.31.0-i486-1.txz pycurl-7.19.0-i486-2.txz
dbus-python-1.2.0-i486-1.txz python-2.7.5-i486-1.txz
notify-python-0.1.1-i486-3.txz
m4-1.4.17-i486-1.txz xfwm4-4.10.1-i486-2.txz xfwm4-themes-4.10.0-i486-1.txz
perl-5.18.1-i486-1.txz perlkde-4.10.5-i486-1.txz perlqt-4.10.5-i486-1.txz
qca-2.0.2-i486-1.txz qca-gnupg-2.0.0_beta3-i486-1.txz
qca-cyrus-sasl-2.0.0_beta3-i486-1.txz qca-ossl-2.0.0_beta3-i486-2.txz
PyQt-4.9.6-i486-1.txz polkit-qt-1-0.103.0-i486-1.txz
kdevelop-pg-qt-1.0.0-i486-1.txz qt-4.8.5-i486-2.txz
libdbusmenu-qt-0.9.2-i486-2.txz qtscriptgenerator-0.2.0-i486-2.txz
perlqt-4.10.5-i486-1.txz smokeqt-4.10.5-i486-1.txz
sendmail-8.14.7-i486-1.txz sendmail-cf-8.14.7-noarch-1.txz
After that, just make a kde restore, becouse slax kde configuration it's not so good, and you'll have a great slackware 14.1 live usb. I've done that and it's working very nice.

Only an Alien could come down to earth and give us some thing Live. Resurrection of a thread that had gone to pasture.
So. Check it out at Alien pastures I sent you a 12 pack of beer Eric. The pay pal way.
Great work Plasma5 live cd OMG.

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