Man you should download the latest Rufus USB creator for Windows10. Then download Ubuntu 20.04 and install it on about a 32gig USB that you can pick up at Office Max pretty cheap. It doesn't have to be that big.

It is blazing fast. It allows you to choose what size persistent file that you want and does it all.
Turns out it loads the OS on sdc1 and creates whatever size persistence you choose and creates sdc2 and mounts it on a /media/casper-rw. The only thing I don't like is that there is no grub2 menu, it just strait up boots Ubuntu.

It is blazing fast. I've never seen anything like it to this point accept Puppy Linux. Its supposed to boot Bios or EfI. I've booted it on my fast EFI desktop but haven't booted it on my laptop yet which is a bios system.

https://rufus.ie/
http://www.releases.ubuntu.com/20.04/

I sincerely appreciate that suggestion. I might just have to give that a try....how is Ubuntu as far as automatic hardware detection goes?

Based just upon the reading I've done at Wikipedia, it appears to have a lot of potential. But it also concerns me the way they have been one of the instigators in abandoning some legacy users in the name of "progress".

All progress is change, but not all change is progress...etc?

Well, just for the record, I'm using Ubuntu right now, booted from a DVD that I burned a few moments ago. It's interesting....

Probably my fault for wanting to "test drive" from a DVD disk first, but it runs WAY slow from a DVD. Took me forever just to get to the choice screen where it asks if you wish to just test run, or install to HD.

Didn't try Rufus yet, either. But it looks worth trying out.

Ubuntu is very nice and very good with hardware detection. Very seldom have I ever booted Ubuntu and not had an instant web connection and sound. I just bought a used faster computer and there was no driver support for the built in internet card. Supposedly it was coming out in the next kernel update but I just bought a linux friendly PCI-E style NIC Ethernet card and plugged it into the PCI-E slot in the mother board and now the wired connection is working again. The other worked but would go on and off.

I boot a lot of different operating systems and use Ubuntu as my main OS controlling the grub2 boot loader.
It has so many programs available in the ubuntu software app and at the terminal plus you can add LXDE to it as well I have that downloading now just to try it out but stock is very nice, may stick with stock.

Ubuntu is breakable unlike Knoppix but worst come to worst keep your data in a safe location and reinstall it.
For the 1st time ever I wiped out my MBR with dd while working on a USB drive and without a backup of the partition I got everything off the drive and wiped it and reinstalled it and was back up in no time.
Ubuntu would no longer boot but nor Windows 10 but with my grub2 Thumb drive I could boot Windows 10 or the Mint install that I have on there so used Mint to get off any data i wanted before wiping the drive.

Here is a nice overview of Ubuntu. Its as good as its ever been right now. I'm very happy with it, been using it since 08. It doesn't come with a lot of the tools that Knoppix has already on it but you can get them all and more if need be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWZsr5JdKEI

Looks as though there is a built-in USB installer in Ubuntu, might give that a try once I pick up a few extra thumb drives.

Is there an easy way to get Ubuntu to use a traditional desktop? I'm not particularly fond of the "tablet style" GUI's.

Well, I must have missed something? Where in the install process does it prompt you to enable persistence?

Welp, I "found" the little slider control that sets the size of the persistence partition on my second trip through the install process. Odd, but I guess the step-by-step instructions that I was following for Rufus must have been for an older version, made no mention of this setting, so I must have breezed by it without noticing it my first attempt.



Slider should appear where red arrow is.

The installed system seems dog slow to me once persistence is activated...I'll have to keep trying. As it stands now, it appears that knoppix with overlay "calms down" sooner than does Ubuntu. .

With Ubuntu, I've booted to a DVD install as well as a USB install,several times now. Why does it keep insisting on resetting my system clock to Universal time? I was even going through the procedure using the desktop "install Ubuntu" icon, installing to USB a couple times, and clearly specified my timezone as "GMT +5", and despite this it STILL screws around with my system clock

Well, I sure have not had similar experience, specific to the "persistence" install.

Thus far, I've burned the iso to a DVD, and that ran "ok", I've placed the iso onto a bootable flash drive without persistence, and that ran expectedly better than the DVD, I've placed the iso "with persistence" onto a flash drive two different times, and in both instances the persistence worked, but at a speed that made knoppix appear like a "performance" system. And I've even used the Ubuntu (nagware) desktop icon for a complete system install to USB, a process that consumed 3 hours after the updates and extras were all downloaded and automatically installed (total install size 7.5 GB).....and that system would boot only to a black screen after several minutes of looking at the word "Ubuntu" in white letters at the bottom of an otherwise black screen.

So, I can't really say that my experiences were positive.

Researching around, I'm starting to believe more and more that the problem is one of architecture, rather than software. When you consider the PRACTICAL bandwidth of USB 2.0 versus the speeds of typical ATA and SATA busses where operating systems are typically installed...there is a tremendous difference, with USB 2.0 at a significant disadvantage. Plus, with the USB 2.0 architecture, "command and control" messaging is transmitted over the same conductors as the data.....AND write times are typically only one third as fast as the already abysmal read data times.

Makes me really wanna go out and buy a machine with USB 3.2 architecture, just to see if that solves the problem.

STILL, you would think that the knoppix people would make this abundantly clear in their docs, rather than depending upon the end user to have an "Eureka!" moment

Source info I found interesting:

http://lyberty.com/tech/terms/usb.html
http://usbspeed.nirsoft.net/?o=5&vna...1921&pid=21885
https://superuser.com/questions/1388...nd-thunderbolt


Some actual physical benchmarks:

https://usb.userbenchmark.com

https://usb.userbenchmark.com/SpeedT...k-Cruzer-Force (the drive I've been using, the "write" rates are particularly troubling)


So it "kinda, sorta, maybe" looks like a bandwidth issue, where once you turn on the "write" capability, you are struggling against the peak write speed cap of the architecture.

This even jives with my experience when booting a knoppix w/overlay system using the "forensic" cheat code at boot time.

If you've got an Ubuntu system installed onto a USB flash drive that is working "blazing fast", I'd sure like to hear more about how you got there.

Sorry I haven't been around lately been caught up trying to fix a 4 wheel scooter that feel off my pa in laws hitch rack after he hit a pot hole turning at a stop sign. He's been in the hospital with heart surgery and I was trying to get it fixed before he gets out.

Yea the Ubuntu that I did with rufus works great. I don't like the file checking at the bootup every single time. The ubuntu USB creator will actually install ubuntu to the USB and be very slow but Rufus gives a good bit faster live version.

My PC is very fast (not near the fastest) as I just upgraded to an i5-4440 intel 3.10ghz quadcore to fly my helicopter simulator but Ubuntu with persistence should run way faster than what Knoppix has been doing lately with persistence.

Maybe the bigger and more resource intense these DVD's get the more they need serious power to run them. My 1st PC was a 600 mhz gateway and it would barely run a command line version of Ubuntu min install.

The USB's honestly have always left a little to be desired for me. A booted .iso is very fast.
For old slower PC's Puppy linux is nice. Try bionic pup. Its loaded with tools and utities. I'm not to fond of the stock gray chalky look but you can tweak it to look very nice by right clicking the desktop and I think 2nd down option. Also its very tiny in size and creates a small pup print on your hard drive and offers to save persistent file on shut down.

As far as running USB's every day I don't use them.
I always took them on trips so I could have linux on my wives lap top. She didn't want linux installed on so the USB Knoppix was nice for me. I've sat and looked over the man pages where we didn't have internet. Other than that I use them to fix problems like booting or copying over failed hard drives and fixing grub2 or partitioning a new drive to install something on.

Sorry to hear about your F I L's bad experiences. The claims about the data buss having to juggle command and control comms with data transfers makes sense in the way I found it necessary to allow knoppix to complete tasks before sending new instructions.

And, a booted knoppix non-overlay system has no difficulty writing data transfers to a separate flash drive plugged into the same machine, so the problem seems to be limited to attempts to read and write to the same USB unit. There is the bottle neck. Pretty much proven by booting even an overlay system with the cheat code "forensic", which makes it run smooth as silk.

There is even a footnote at the bottom of the published knoppix cheatcode page (specific to the mkswap and swapon commands) warning that running a swap arrangement on flash media can be "painfully slow".

While I am not attempting a physical swap operation, I guess the persistence has to go through the same motions as a swap file would have to.
So, that's probably as close to a confession as I am likely to get?

So, I guess that I'll just have to deal with it until I talk myself into buying a usb 3.x compliant system.

On the positive side of all this, I've been beating my head against the wall long enough trying to find workarounds that I've got a pretty good routine established creating a "remastered" system that already includes the bells and whistles that are important to me, sufficient that obtaining persistence isn't a dire emergency.

And if I do talk myself into a new machine, I'll be sure to set up a seperate on-board partition for that snazzy ubuntu demo you linked me up with.

Yea a remastered Knoppix works great on USB without the persistence.
I do like the way Ubuntu uses another partition for its casper-rw persistent file now.

I hate the way Ubuntu mounts another hard drive though if I click to open it.
For example this is how it mounts my Mint install partition on sda4 if I don't do sudo mount /dev/sda4 /media/sda4 in the terminal.

I click to open sda4
type$ df -h in the terminal to show all mounted files systems, their used space and available space and this is what I get

/dev/sda4 mounted on /media/gemu/109d6419-e99b-4d46-a260-10373f9ecc38
where Knoppix would automatically mount /dev/sda4 on media/sda4 very terminal friendly.
but once a folder is open you can right click and open a terminal inside that folder so you don't have to type or copy that long mount point to copy, delete or mv things with the terminal.

It seems like every OS has one little thing or two that aggravates you. In Knoppix its having that tiny corner to hit to drag open the file and make it larger.
Windows 10 boots faster than anything I've ever seen but it can't see into linux file systems.


I found one thing that hogs resources on Ubuntu and you can get rid of it but some things won't work as good. its called tracker-store and tracker-miner-fs
Here you can see how hard they are hitting the CPU
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/0...e-tracker.html

I complained years ago at the ubuntuforums that Ubuntu 8.10 was a sytem hog compared to WindowsXP on my 600 mhz desktop. Ubuntu min install literally slowed it to a crawl much like the Knoppix data overlay does when its loaded but Windows XP ran fine with very little CPU hit.

I have particularly enjoyed that aspect, as well....I can't figure out why ALL operating systems do not offer that functionality.

jfyi, I booted windows for the first time in about a year, just to use your "rufus" utility....and it felt weird.....even awkward...

When I used the Ubuntu desk top utility to install ubuntu to flash drive (the full install, requiring internet connectedness), it installed a boot selection menu onto the USB that among other things included my windows OS as one of the selections....not sure if that is the "Grub" utility that you fondly refer to...but I was surprised to see that pop up AFTER I had selected the usb drive via bios.

Of course, my windows system was unstartable the next time I tried to boot it normally, had to do a recovery in order to fix things.

Sounds like it installed grub to your windows hard drive but with no linux system on the Windows hard drive it wouldn't work.
If you were installing on the hard drive you would have wanted the bootloader to go to /dev/sda where it went but on USB it would be /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc whichever your USB is mounted as.

Now with that USB you can boot your windows boot.mgr from the USB.
You can add other menuentrys to that as well and boot an .iso inside an /iso folder on the root of the windows hard drive too if you have enough space for some .iso files there.

Just say you had 5 different linux installs on your PC on different partititoins with grub2 installed to each systems partition for that linux OS you can boot all of their /boot/grub/grub.cfg menu with your thumb drive even if the onboard bootloader has failed.

Or if for some reason you wipe out your boot loader like I did the other day with dd. Nothing would boot. I could make Ubuntu boot with my USB but it never would fully boot past the Ubuntu logo because I had wiped out some files.

I tried a few things and finally realized with no backup of my MBR the quickest way to fix it was to reinstall Ubuntu.

To back up things off Ubuntu, I did that from my Mint install because it copies and pastes freely like Windows10 and I could easily drop and drag things over to my Mint install without using a terminal.
To boot Mint Linux with my thrumb drive I did the following:

Boot the USB to the grub2 menu, hit c key to go to command line
type set root=(hd1,gpt4) and hit enter. Mint is actually on (hd0,gpt4) but the USB is occupying the (hd0) slot at this stage of booting.
Then type configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg to pull up Mints grub.cfg menu to boot it.

So I got everything off and used sudo gparted to reformat the Ubuntu partition on /dev/sda2 then booted into the Ubuntu live CD and reinstalled.

Well, actually I chose to unmount sda during the install to sdc process, and during the subsequent boot process very definitely selected the USB drive through my bios selector....and that sent me into the linux based boot selector.

Doesn't take a lot to foul up a MBR, unfortunately.

Long ago when I was a tinkerer, I had Windows 95 and Windows NT with their common Bootloader, side by side with OS/2 v4 and it's bootmanager, along with PCDOS 7.1 which was also selectable via the OS/2 bootmanager, and then added SUSE beside that, which included some mandatory GUI type boot selector.

Along with a few "hacker" style linux mini systems you could boot from 3 floppy discks.

Overall, it was like a trip to the carnival midway

ArYou'll love grub2 when you get more familiar with it. You can use ls in the command line at boot and it shows you all the visible hard drives
$ ls
(hd0,msdos1), (hd0,msdos2) , (hd1,gpt1) (hd,1,gpt2) and so on.

And then you can go farther into the files with ls
$ls (hd0,msdos1)/iso for instance to see the .iso's inside
Then do $ loopback loop (hd0,msdos1)/iso/knoppix8.6.1.iso
That mounts the iso file.
Then ls (loop) will let you look into the contents of the DVD to find which kernal and initrd its booting with sometimes you can get lucky and boot something with a slighly edited menu on the fly that was meant for another os.

Old grub legacy I loved as well but grub2 blows it away with functions, commands and booting iso's.
grub2 sees hard drives starting at 0,1 2 and 4 and partitions start at 1,2,3 and 4 and so on.
grub legacy held 0,0 as 1st hard drive and 1st partition.

I just have learned that you can reboot from the grub2 menu and shutdown.
type reboot in the command line and it does just that and halt shuts it down.
Ctrl + alt + del will reboot. I've always used that.