Hi everyone,

I've been trying to sort out getting Linux onto a USB flash drive for the last few days with the usual responses of 'Google it' but truthfully, most of the information is junk and a repeat of the blatently obvious on numerous blog posts.

There's a few things I wanted to know more about:

1) When I first used a flash drive distro a few years back the biggest concern was writing to the drive multiple times and destroying the drive. Is the situation still the same? If I were to buy a current 32GB flash drive and stick a full installation on it rather than a live distro with persistence is it going to get hammered by the OS writing to it all the time?

2) If I'm forced into a distro with persistence can I freely add applications to it (not so worried for updates)? Most distros I've checked so far seem to umm and ahh when it comes to adding applications.

3) Live distros seem to pick up varying hardware better. I recently tried Crunchbang on USB because I'm familiar with my desktop install but each machine I've tried it on it seems to have set the hardware on the first machine and then shoves a few errors at me on boot up if I try it on a different machine about not finding expected hardware. Do full installs generally set the hardware permanently or these days do they detect hardware on each boot up?

4) Is there any current documentation on the web about the difference between full installs and live distros, particularly explaining about data writes, ramdisks and persistence etc?

I would prefer to put a full install on a big USB that detects hardware on each boot but if that's not possible does anyone have suggestions on live distros with persistence that are easier on updates and new apps, but with a professional desktop (the last two dedicated USB distros I've used looked like the desktop was designed by a popular Toy chain store )

Thanks for any input.

1. Sure, usb's wear out. Not sure if you have to worry. I don't. By the time it might wear out, the replacement cost is pennies.

2. Well, there are two basic ways to install to a usb. One is a live to usb sort of cheat. The other is to just install to usb just as if it were a real drive. I use the latter.

3. In almost all cases, live and normal install are no different for how it uses drivers. Consider them the same. It is much easier to add support and modify normal installs.

4. I'd guess some but it makes little difference anymore.

I remember reading some time ago the maximum writes was about 100,00. The site below has some info on it with estimated variations between 10,000 and 1,000,000.

http://cfgearblog.blogspot.com/2011/...e-last_22.html

Adding applications to different distros is possible but I think there are a lot of distributions which do not offer a persistent option. Knoppix is easy to create persistence but because of its design, it would be difficult to add applications as it uses Debian repositories as a base with software from different releases. This results in conflicts and as they indicate on their site, if you want to do this or a full hard drive install you should be a 'Linux expert'.

Ubuntu and most of its derivatives should be no problem as far as persistence but I'm not sure if there is a limit as to the size of a persistence file.

IMO, the best way to approach this is to not run a live install drive, but to do a full installation to a USB drive. I prefer using an SD card on most devices, but on a few laptops the SD card sticks out and is a PITA. You can get a large USB flash drive that barely protrudes outside the USB port, and those work pretty well. I have Debian installed on such a drive, for booting on my chromebook. I leave the ChromeOS on the internal SSD, and run Debian completely from the USB drive. By the time the drive has been affected by writes, it will be years in the future, and it will be long obsolete. I still have flash drives and SD cards around with capacities in the megabytes, which still work fine but are too small to be useful. Worrying about wearing out a flash drive is a waste of time. Just go ahead and do a full install of your preferred distro to a flash drive, and get on with life.

I used Fedora liveusb-creator https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ to make a bootable fedora 19 usb stick with persistent storage. My only complaint is it's kind of slow writing, such as doing a yum update, but it's a cheap usb2 stick

One difference between a pendrive live and normal install is a compression of the main distro. It may be that live with persistence is faster because of the compressed data being transferred to cpu/memory. It is best to use higher speed flash drives.