LinuxQuestions.org - Setting up Linux Mint 20.1 on a USB drive temporarily for testing/recovery purposes, some questions.

I installed (as in an actual install, not just running is a LiveUSB) Mint 20.1 on a USB drive for temporary purposes on a system I need to do some testing then data recovery of Windows drives on. I did this before a few months ago on a previous 19 version of Mint and finally got everything working as I wanted, but that was on a different and much older motherboard and off a far slower and smaller USB drive, this time it's on a modern system and using a much larger and faster USB drive that was rated as one of the best options for running a USB OS from outside of getting an external SSD, but it's giving me several problems.

Ok, so I wrote the LiveUSB image to a USB drive using Rufus, I disconnected every other drive on the system and just had that LiveUSB drive and said blank new USB drive to install it on plugged in. I booted it, chose install, and it asked me to connect to WiFi. After that, I was surprised that it didn't seem to ask what drive to install to, it just automatically picked said blank USB drive, the only option to manually choose an install location would have apparently also required me to manually setup the partitions and mount point, which I have no idea how to do for Linux. Is this just because I only had one drive and would Mint have given be a choice of which drive to install to if I had more than one? Or does it automatically choose regardless unless you manually configure everything?

Anyway, so I set a password, set it to just automatically log me in since this is just going to be a temporary setup I only need for a few days, it installs, I remove the LiveUSB and reboot.

First thing I notice on reboot is that no updates were installed, which I found odd since I assumed that was the point of connecting to WiFi during the install (I could have sworn that 19 did that when I did this same thing on it), but one thing that was the same was defaulting to the nouveau drivers, and I have an Nvidia card in the system. So I go to the driver manager and choose to install Nvidia's latest instead. It installs, asks me to reboot.... and that's when I ran into my first problem.

When I am at my desktop again my resolution is considerably smaller with a warning message that video acceleration is disabled.

I check the driver manager, the Nvidia drivers are installed and set. I try to start the Nvidia control panel.... it opens to a window with nothing in it. Trying to Google about it nearly every result led back to this one:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=301215

I tried the "inxi -b" command he mentioned and got the same result, three drivers were loaded at once. I did the same thing he did and uninstalled "xserver-xorg-video-fbdev", and this worked.... mostly. Video acceleration is now working, I tested it by running the Superposition benchmark and it ran fine, but now I no longer get logged in automatically and have to enter my password every login. Is there any easy way to fix that?

In addition to that, considering I am testing several things and a lot of them require admin permissions, it's getting very frustrating entering my password every 10 seconds for every little thing. Considering this is a temp install I only need for a few days (a few weeks at most) for testing/recovery, is there any way I can tone that down? I know I can completely disable asking for a password but that seems a little too risky.

The second problem I ran into was trying to be able to remote into the system so I don't have to be monitoring it all the time for the testing I will be doing, especially since once I start working on those drives operations could take hours or days. The built-in remote desktop was apparently removed starting with version 19, I followed this guide to add it back in, though without the much easier to configure GUI:

https://thelinuxexperiment.com/enabl...linux-mint-19/

It works, but I have two issues with this.

The first is when he mentions "Don’t forget to set this up to run automatically if you want it to happen every time you boot up"..... he doesn't say how, and I have no idea how to do that. I tried to Google it and it looked like adding the "/usr/lib/vino/vino-server" command to the "Applets" application would be the way to do that, is that correct? And is there any way to have the vino server running like this without having a terminal window open?

The other issue is the two commands that site says to use, the gsettings one. I need them because the Windows client I use (TightVNC) doesn't seem to support the security protocols of vino, and can only connect if they are disabled. But I apparently need to configure those settings every boot, and I don't remember how to make those stick. I recall there was some application back when I setup 19 that basically gives you a GUI frontend for those and lets you toggle them, but I could not find it in 20.1.

And finally, while TightVNC/vino does the job.... when I can get it configured properly on the Linux system.... it's quite rough. I had been experimenting with my Windows systems with other clients lately and one I have started to like quite a lot is Parsec. While it's not exactly intended for system administration and meant more for streaming games, it certainly can be used as a remote desktop client too. Even for games I noticed that it seems to do a far less laggy and better image compression job than Steam's own built in streaming, despite being limited to 1/3rd the max bandwidth Steam can support. Problem is, I could not connect to my Linux system when I installed it, it was then that I noticed that while it is available for several PC and mobile platforms..... it only supports Windows hosts, all the others are just clients to connect to a Windows host. Is there anything like Parsec but that supports Linux hosts and is cross-platform?