Running Slackware off a microSD card?

I have this recurring fantasy to run Slackware on my work laptop. I don't want to disturb the Windows 10 install, so installing Slackware to a microSD card would be great. I could leave it plugged in and just boot to it when I reboot my laptop and choose the card to boot from. When I reboot, back to Windows.

Is this even feasible? From researching USB flash drives from a while ago you want something that can specifically write random 4k files fairly quickly. It should be benchmarked to be over 1 MB/s. There are only a handful of USB flash drives that can do that apparently, but with microSD cards, it seems there are a lot of cards that meet this requirement.

Has anyone had any experience running Slackware off a microSD card? Was it a miserably slow experience? Raspberry Pis seem to do it all the time and I haven't seen people complain about the speeds.

James

I don't know about Slackware, but you could run Porteus, which is based on Slackware, off an SD card. It's designed for it.

http://www.porteus.org/

I was doing exactly this with my work laptop using Eric's Slackware Live on a 64gb USB stick, but it was running a bit slow for my tastes.

I use Porteus for this purpose now, and I absolutely love it. Blazing fast, modular, works like a charm.

I've run slackware-based distros (SlackEl and the now long since gone FluxFLux) from an ordinary SD card and yes, it can be done, but of course it will be slightly slower than using a HDD/SSD. But a full install on a SD will always be faster than running a live version from a stick or card (not least when booting)

And there are micro SDs out there boasting 80MB r/w speed, e.g SanDisk's Ultra microSDXC Class 10 - about $10 for 32GB.

There is of course a slight risk for errors when resizing partitions, but if you have lots of free space on your HDD/SSD I would nevertheless contemplate creating a Linux partition. IIRC Windows10 are installed over more than one partition - one for the OS and one for user files. Resizing the latter should be troublefree. I once resized partitions on a PC running WinXP, creating space for a Linux install without any issues.

EDIT: at a second reading I saw that you're talking about your work laptop. Then of course it might be a good idea leaving it alone - or your IT department may complain.

Originally Posted by Lysander666 I don't know about Slackware, but you could run Porteus, which is based on Slackware, off an SD card. It's designed for it. http://www.porteus.org/

I will look into that, thanks!

James

Originally Posted by kgha And there are micro SDs out there boasting 80MB r/w speed, e.g SanDisk's Ultra microSDXC Class 10 - about $10 for 32GB.

I am looking at this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07G3H5RBT/

Ratings are super high and it's one of the fastest.

Originally Posted by kgha There is of course a slight risk for errors when resizing partitions, but if you have lots of free space on your HDD/SSD I would nevertheless contemplate creating a Linux partition. IIRC Windows10 are installed over more than one partition - one for the OS and one for user files. Resizing the latter should be troublefree. I once resized partitions on a PC running WinXP, creating space for a Linux install without any issues. EDIT: at a second reading I saw that you're talking about your work laptop. Then of course it might be a good idea leaving it alone - or your IT department may complain.

Yes, I don't want any imperial entanglements. I still need Windows as there are a couple of programs I need to run which I don't know if they work in Linux. I might be able to find ways around using them. Also, if I need my laptop repaired or I suddenly need to leave my job I can pull the sd card and keep all my stuff, they can keep the laptop.

James

That SanDisk Extreme Pro card seems fast (and large) enough!

As has been discussed in another thread, it must of course be remembered that an SD card will wear out faster than a SSD/HDD and that it might give up altogether (as most of us have experienced with USB sticks). But in my experience, SanDisk products are reliable enough.

I think if you can get your machine to boot from SD, it should work.

I tried this with AlienBob's excellent live XFCE iso, but my bios/efi doesn't support booting directly from SD. I plugged it into a USB adaptor and it did work. If you can find a way to chainload it, from a bootloader running off a USB stick or a gpt partition/mbr on a standard hdd, that should work too.

I found the read/writes to be a bit slow for my liking. Once some reads start on a directory, things tend to respond quickly, but I find there tends to be an initial hiccup in even doing simple operations like 'ls'.

By way of example, I also tried mounting /home to my SD card, and it really caused some major hiccups, especially with playing YouTube videos on Chromium. I guess it tried to read/write a lot of temporary data to /home, which would result in major pauses in video playback every couple of minutes.

So while it may work for some simple word processing and basic web browsing/email, I wouldn't recommend for multimedia-heavy web browsing.

look in the BIOS if you can get to it to see if you can even use your work laptop's BIOS and make sure it has boot from SDCard option. Most new ones do, but you might be locked out of your BIOS and boot list options. I'd look into that first, if you have not already done so, before buying anything for your project.

noatime

add to your fstab for your SD Card to cut back on read writes to it.

In addition to slow i/o speeds, microSD cards have a finite number of write operations, and therefore aren't great for journaling file systems or for swap: consider a portable ssd.

I successfully got mine to boot on multiple efi systems (with luks+crypt)! The tricky part is to address file systems by UUID in elilo.conf, fstab, and when making initrd. I also followed the extra instructions at the bottom of README_UEFI.txt:

If the menu entry doesn't work on your system, you can still force your machine to boot ELILO automatically by copying the files in /EFI/Slackware on your EFI System Partition to /EFI/BOOT on your EFI System Partition, and renaming /EFI/BOOT/elilo.efi to /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX86.EFI.