Make Live USB with persistence of different Distro
 

I'm using Fedora 32 Cinnimon. I have a need to make a live USB with persistence of a different distro. Fedora Media Writer does not support persistence and the livecd-iso-to-disk utility does not work for any other distro except Fedora. I'm not sure, but I don't thing that dd will support persistence either and I'm great at working on the command line. Can someone suggest how I might do this?

Yes.
Actually, the best way is to NOT depend upon the current host OS for anything other than creating the USB drive. Read up on the persistence requirements of your LIVE os and satisfy those.

That said, there are DOZENS of tools and ways to make the live-cd usb device. I prefer the ones listed in my signature (because they do not even require unpacking the ISO image, you just make the USB drive then copy the ISO into the right place), but there are many tools that will work.

It MAY be easier or harder than average depending upon the target OS you plan to use. What is your target distribution?

As I said, I'm currently using Fedora 32 Cinnamon. I need to make a live usb with persistence of Kubuntu. I quickly skimmed through the doc for Ventoy. I can't say that I totally understand it yet, but it appears to be a good way to do it. I'll study it a bit more and, perhaps, give it a try. If I understand it correctly, it is nice because nothing but the installation file has to be installed into Fedora.

If you run Kubuntu live, there should be a way to do it all from the menu, (at least, there used to be).

Can you elaborate some? Kubuntu live is what I need to create with persistence. I can make one without persistence usng dd in Fedora, but I don't know how to add the persistence. Are you saying there is a way to add persistence after the Kubuntu live usb is created?
Thanks

I much prefer good documentation to movies, BUT there seem to be an abundance of videos corrupting the results of most searches. This one pertains to E2B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIvbb9135m4 and should work for any Ubuntu based distro (including Kubuntu). This uses a mnu file, which is pretty easy and well illustrated. It might work for most others that support persistence, but I have not tested that.

Documentation here https://www.easy2boot.com/add-payloa...h-persistence/


Ventoy persistence (using a json file) (which is also pretty easy) is discussed in the documentat here : https://ventoy.net/en/plugin_persistence.html

There are a gazillion (it seems, mostly poorly done) videos for creating a live-usb persistent device containing ubuntu from ubuntu. These should work for any *buntu variant (I have not tested) but I could not find one for Fedora. If you can get the proper tools installed, or find one that does not require *buntu specific tools, it should work from Fedora just as well.

I can point out a likely candidate if you wish.

You used to be able to boot from a *buntu live & use that to create a persistent one by using a second pendrive - long time since I've used any *buntu distros though. :)


https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1051...-more-than-4gb

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/1491...b-flash-drive/

fatmac, I thought about trying that, but I don't have but the one spare usb stick and didn't want to make a special shopping trip to get another. Sometime, I'll get some extras and give it a try. In the meantime, you have both given me lots of info to digest.
My purpose is to look for distros that do a good job of supporting touchscreen control.(Fedora Cinnamon does pretty well). Out of the box, Kubuntu has very little touchscreen support. I thought that doing a system update and other configuration changes after making the live usb it might load some configuration that would improve it. Hence, the need for persistence.

Perhaps you could remaster a live distro to contain all the necessary drivers, without having to use persistence(?).

Or maybe, just install a distro that has the support, to your pendrive(?).

Yes. Unless there is a better way, I'm trying to use the pendrive with persistence for testing. Once I find one that works well, I can then do a re-master. I have searched around for this information, but so far, I haven't found anything definitive. It seems to me that the distros and configurations that support touchscreen gestures should be known by this time. The Fedora 32 Cinnamon Spin works better than anything I have found so far. Having said that, I should say that Gnome3 also seems to work well, but I didn't care for it. So, I didn't use it very long.

Ventoy

Revisit post #6

You may not have noticed, but there are instructions linked there for using VENTOY and E2B for creating or modifying your USB device AFTER installing VENTOY or E2B on it to run images using persistence. Unless I misunderstand totally, that IS your goal.

An advantage of E2B and VENTOY are that they allow you to run more than one ISO from the same USB device. You can load up one, or multiple, instances from the boot menu of the USB device and select the one you want: any of them using persistence that support persistence and that you have configured to use persistence.

That mens you can try kumuntu, xbuntu, a newer Fedora, or other distributions.

The limit is the number of ISO files that will fit on your device without fragmentation. (I rarely fill on over 60% full.) Since live-cd images tend to be small, that still allows for a lot of images on one device.

Yes. I did notice that. And, it appears that they will do what I need. I just haven't yet had a opportunity to study the instructions. I am not very command line astute. So, I need some free time to try understanding what to do. I may be posting some questions about that.

Finally getting back to this little project. I have run the Ventoy script creating a USB drive and have copied two .iso files to it. It works great allowing me to choose either .iso from a menu to run live. However, I am having trouble understanding what I need to do regarding persistence. Refer to the Ventoy documentation page regarding the Persistence Plugin:
https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_persistence.html

I understand that I need to add a data file for each .iso to the ventoy directory on the USB drive. The "CreatePersistentImg.sh" script provided will create a data file or I can use one of the pre-created files provided by a link. Do I assume correctly that I should manually copy these to the /ventoy directory? The example menu at the bottom of the page seems to suggest that each file gets named according to which .iso will use them. Correct?

In the first paragraph of the page, there is a statement to "Just put a persistence data file in the 1st partition and tell Ventoy by the json configuration". I do not find a /ventoy/ventoy.json file. So, I assume I must create one. Do I just copy the example and make adjustments to the naming of the .iso and data files to fit my situation? I guess this is what links the .iso to the proper data file? I could use some specific directions here.

My plan for testing various .iso(s) is to run it from the USB and then do a complete update so that everything will be current. I will then try to make a few configuration changes to get the best touch screen response that I can. How much data file size would you recommend to allow for that.

There are some notes printed in blue near the bottom of the page. The first one is regarding "take care about the buffer". Does that simply mean to make sure the USB has enough room before adding another .iso and data file? The second has to do with distro labels (casper-rw or other?). If I want to test a distro that is not listed, how do I find out which label to use?

I know that is a lot of questions. Your help is appreciated.

9/25/20 follow-up: I found another website that provided guidance that helped me figure it out. Since I am using a .dat file for each ISO, I'm assuming that 1 GB will be sufficient. I still don't have an answer regarding the "casper-rw or other" question.

Make Live USB with persistence of different Distro
 

Were you able to use ventoy?

IMHO it's currently the best and simplest tool to create your USB boot source.

I've been using it for some time and loving it. It's a great tool, as previously mentioned.

It allows for booting from multiple iso files, sure one at a time, and with persistence, which is very cool.

I advise you to read this article from Logix.

Keep in mind Ventoy used to make its persistence file extension as img (persistence.img), and from a while ago on it was replaced by dat (now is persistence.dat), so wherever you see printed .img, replace it by .dat. Logix states this with additional details in his article.

Another trick (again IMHO) is when you're going to create the persistence.dat file using the CreatePersistentImg.sh script: one of the parameters in its syntax is a LABEL you may want to pass on if required for a specific iso distro file.

By default (i.e., if not explicitly entered) it will assume it is casper-rw, and this won't work for MX Linux, for instance, as MX Linux requires the Label MX-Persist. So if not added a label as parameter, it will work for Ubuntu anyways, as it will be labeled casper-rw by default.

And for my own convenience, I renamed the dat files after the iso ones, changing in the ventoy.json file accordingly as well.

Take a look at Ventoy Persistence Plugin page.

HTH,

Lindux