Best USB Flash Distro?

Arthenik · 2010-09-25 20:15:59

I am looking for a good lightweight and portable distro to install on my USB flash disk in case I have to work on a PC that doesn't have Linux installed. I would also use it as a recovery distro.

I've tried Puppy Linux, but I disliked a) its choice of programs (some of which I was unable to install) b) its lack of vim support c) how difficult/tiring it was to install packages d) it not adhering to principles of The Arch Way.

Of course, having Arch would be the most best option, but it seems a bit on the bulky side (although my flash disk has 16GB - I am willing to sacrifice up to 4GB to Linux and leave the rest to a VFAT partition). I am also not sure how portable such a solution would be.

So, does anyone have any experience with portable distros? Could anyone recommend one?

graysky · 2010-09-25 20:19:39

...Arch! I have it on a 4 GB USB key for just this reason; works great.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … _a_USB_key

chris-kun · 2010-09-25 20:23:56

arch is on the bulky side? first time hearing that one...

karol · 2010-09-25 20:26:28

If you think Arch is too fat, have a look at slitaz and tiny core.
4 GB should be enough for Arch though.

Arthenik · 2010-09-25 20:38:37

That was just the impression I had. I know some of these portable distros optimize their packages and kernel for size, use BusyBox etc. Arch doesn't do this as far as I know. I am sure it could be done, but it seems like too much extra work. I will probably try Arch anyway, it's just amazing on my notebook and my desktop.

Graysky: How is portability? Do you have to set the system up for every machine, or does it all work out-of-the-box? I would expect the latter, going over what I had to do to set Arch up for my PCs, but this might be a different case.

72linus · 2010-09-25 21:32:09

you could do as I have done and make a remaster of your arch hdd install into a livecd/usb just like Slax
meaning it runs like Slax with various boot cheatcodes,etc

The nFluxOS ARCH edition and AfterGlow editions are basically the same except for WM's (fluxbox vs pekwm)
they are based on arch testing repo!
I also make a debian sid, slackware current, and ubuntu 10.10 versions

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … ost4096003

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/O … 9727.shtml

but, the importance of these is each one can be remastered into whatever you want
add/remove pkgs, setup as you wish then remaster

I made both a slackware mini and rescue editions to
mini & miniscr
http://multidistro.com/NFLUXNEW/SQ4/slack.html

I havent put out the new make-your-own kits yet
but I have the old ones which are 2.6.34
http://multidistro.com/NFLUXNEW/SQ4/kkits/kkits.html

anyway; if you wanna go this route I'll help you

defears · 2010-09-25 21:55:37

Try pclos, the openbox version of course. This is the perfect distro to for a usb key because most things work ootb, and making a remaster is one click. I find my arch install on usb lacking on other people's computers sometimes if you don't know what hardware it is and looking for solutions without internet access is a pain. Especially when you will only use it once. I have 4 boxes with arch and love it but usb remasters is way easier with other distros. Hate to say it but even Ubuntu with remastersys is a good live rescue solution.

R00KIE · 2010-09-25 22:17:44

The beauty of having arch on a flash disk is that you don't need to relearn how to configure and tweak stuff and things usually work better than with any live cd you can get your hands on.

A 4GB partition should be enough for arch but you need to be careful with what you install, if you want a big DE and lots of extra apps most probably 4GB might not be enough.

karol · 2010-09-25 22:22:21

R00KIE wrote:

A 4GB partition should be enough for arch but you need to be careful with what you install, if you want a big DE and lots of extra apps most probably 4GB might not be enough.

Would that work http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Max … ing_.2Fusr ?

graysky · 2010-09-25 22:48:09

Arthenik wrote:

Graysky: How is portability? Do you have to set the system up for every machine, or does it all work out-of-the-box? I would expect the latter, going over what I had to do to set Arch up for my PCs, but this might be a different case.

If you use i686 you should be good to go. I have used it on my desktop, laptop, and a few other machines with no issues provided the machine can boot from USB.

R00KIE wrote:

The beauty of having arch on a flash disk is that you don't need to relearn how to configure and tweak stuff and things usually work better than with any live cd you can get your hands on.
A 4GB partition should be enough for arch but you need to be careful with what you install, if you want a big DE and lots of extra apps most probably 4GB might not be enough.

+1 for these statements!

I have Gnome on the stick and it's just fine. You can make some extra room by using lxde or something but I see no reason to do so. Just pacman -Scc to remove the packages and it'll buy you some extra space too. I also see no reason to remaster anything, just install and use. See that wiki page I posted for grub setup suggestions.

lilsirecho · 2010-09-25 23:03:52

CTKArchLive is ~500MB archbased (french) and runs in ram if desired. Openbox and pacmanfm with midori amd arora browsers, jumanji also can be added.

English is available in CTKhome partition addon.

Can be operated in a 1 or 2GB flash device.

Easy download and dd to flash device. Partition for CTKhome and add the addon( see arch wiki).

Gusar · 2010-09-25 23:42:16

Wow, you guys are talking gigabytes. My own Arch based live distro is 44,2MB. I stripped it as much as I could without resorting to recompiling everything with -Os, while still having all the stuff needed to use a machine comfortably. It loads into RAM and requires as little as 192MB of it to fully function. Well, until you start Firefox, but even then 256MB is probably enough if you don't open too many tabs.

Ghost1227 · 2010-09-26 00:14:35

Gusar wrote:

Wow, you guys are talking gigabytes. My own Arch based live distro is 44,2MB. I stripped it as much as I could without resorting to recompiling everything with -Os, while still having all the stuff needed to use a machine comfortably. It loads into RAM and requires as little as 192MB of it to fully function. Well, until you start Firefox, but even then 256MB is probably enough if you don't open too many tabs.

Any chance you'd be willing to share that?

axel668 · 2010-09-26 07:09:35

Have a look at http://www.archbang.org, runs fine from CD or USB

l'pc · 2010-09-26 08:38:59

For maximum portability : -install i686 version as said before
- install many xf86-video-* packages (actually ati, nv, intel and savage are enough for most needs. You shouldn't expect accelerated 3D on all machines)
- install wireless_tools and wpa_supplicant
- if you are to boot often from old hardware, make a small swap partition. (it shouldn't be used, but if there isn't enough ram, you'll be safe. Obviously, you'll need to change swappiness)
You are talking of a vfat partition : if you want it to be readable by Windows, it should be the first partition of the disk. I've been sharing it with my /boot, and it isn't a good idea because vfat don't support file permissions, and I obviously didn't want non-root user to write to /boot...
I would recommend to have it mounted as /home/$YOURUSER (if you don't mind one set of permissions)

Last edited by l'pc (2010-09-26 15:12:17)

Gusar · 2010-09-26 08:56:43

Ghost1227 wrote:

Gusar wrote:
Wow, you guys are talking gigabytes. My own Arch based live distro is 44,2MB. I stripped it as much as I could without resorting to recompiling everything with -Os, while still having all the stuff needed to use a machine comfortably. It loads into RAM and requires as little as 192MB of it to fully function. Well, until you start Firefox, but even then 256MB is probably enough if you don't open too many tabs.
Any chance you'd be willing to share that?

Hmm, I'd have to strip it of all personal stuff (Firefox bookmarks, networks I connect to frequently, etc; change fonts from tahoma and corefonts to something redistributable), but I guess I could work on putting together a public version. Where can I get some nice Arch wallpapers?

karol · 2010-09-26 11:05:30

Gusar wrote:

Where can I get some nice Arch wallpapers?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=90749 :-)

R00KIE · 2010-09-26 13:10:49

Gusar wrote:

Wow, you guys are talking gigabytes. My own Arch based live distro is 44,2MB. I stripped it as much as I could without resorting to recompiling everything with -Os, while still having all the stuff needed to use a machine comfortably. It loads into RAM and requires as little as 192MB of it to fully function. Well, until you start Firefox, but even then 256MB is probably enough if you don't open too many tabs.

Now that is cool but how did you manage to get it that small, only xulrunner that you need to run firefox is 16MB compressed with xz.

I prefer to have the whole lot installed because the flash disk is meant to be my recovery (or test) disk, just in case I bork my main system or need a linux system to recover (or boot from) any other machine. That said I do have a lot of stuff installed, I have started with just base and base-devel with xfce and a few utils (mostly disk utilities), but over time I have installed lots of other things like openoffice which quickly use lots of space. If you are in a jam then better have all the stuff you might need already installed, installing to a flash disk is slow as molasses, at least with the flash disk I'm using, and you never know if you will have internet to install anything you might need.

On the driver front, I'm not sure but I think you can't have support for everything under the sun, last time I tried there was some dri (or other) stuff that conflicted with each other but that was quite some time ago so it might not be the case now.

Like l'pc says a 32bit install is more compatible but if you plan to chroot into a 64bit system later on you are stuck, you need to decide between a 32bit system and a 64bit one based on the machines you might find later on.

Gusar · 2010-09-26 14:36:59

R00KIE wrote:

Now that is cool smile but how did you manage to get it that small [...]

Yeah, Firefox is the largest part of the thing. It's a custom compile though, with -Os, and it's 3.7a4pre or something like that, newer versions of Firefox are quite a bit larger with all the new features. Edit: The browser included now is Midori, Firefox has grown way too much over the years. MPlayer is also a custom compile with -Os, but it's not missing anything, it plays it all.
For recovery, there's testdisk and gparted, but only e2fsprogs, dosfstools and ntfsprogs. You're also right concerning drivers, there's only drivers for what I deemed common hardware, so it could very well be there's stuff missing. DRI is not installed at all, just the base intel, ati, nouveau and vesa drivers. I also stripped a lot, like /usr/include, /usr/share/doc, etc.

As I said, it's my personal thing, and I wanted it as small as possible. Why? Because . I don't need a better reason. If you want to give it a try: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-71 … ml#7100532. It boots straight into X. Once there, there's a dropdown console accessible by pressing F12. To get online, right-click on the desktop (or the conky widget, it's a neat trick if a maximized app is open) and use the Network menu.

Good link karol, nice wallpapers as such, but too dark for my taste. I opted of this: http://sistematico.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2839wq

Last edited by Gusar (2013-12-04 20:04:14)

TigTex · 2010-09-26 15:29:28

Well, since my laptop gone to RMA, I use a usb pen with archlinux inside. It's a 32bit setup on a 8gb pen, "df" shows me 1.2gb of used space, with lxde and all the applications that I need, and 50mb of ram usage after booting. I must say that sometimes it can be faster than an HDD install, it takes only from 8 to 10 seconds to boot (depends of the pc). The usb pen almost never blinks, only when I open a new application (and the other I/O reasons of course). I use extlinux as boot loader (grub can be slow on some particular pc's).
The only problem that I have is with nouveau. It needs a xorg config to make it work and I have to manualy add that on nvidia pc's.
Apart from that, perfect
I boot this setup in notebooks, pentium4's, core 2 duo, amd's... everything works flawlessly

Arch is the best usb flash distro

Last edited by TigTex (2010-09-26 15:31:13)

Gusar · 2010-09-26 16:11:17

TigTex wrote:

The only problem that I have is with nouveau. It needs a xorg config to make it work and I have to manualy add that on nvidia pc's.

Gentoo has a patch that makes nouveau default: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewv … ver/files/

firecat53 · 2010-09-26 18:06:46

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Larch yet. Works great and is a bit faster and easier on flash drives than a standard Arch installed to a flash drive because it uses the compressed filesystem.

Scott

dolby · 2010-09-29 07:55:53

Parted Magic. Best mini distro ever.

thisoldman · 2010-09-29 11:20:24

I've become impressed with SystemRescueCD. It's got a wide choice of start-up options and has, for me, worked on a wide variety of hardware.

Texas · 2010-09-29 14:55:30

If flash USB stick, be sure to use the "noatime" option in /etc/fstab to prevent excessive writes.

Last edited by Texas (2010-09-29 14:55:45)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-25 20:15:59

Best USB Flash Distro?

#2 2010-09-25 20:19:39

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#3 2010-09-25 20:23:56

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#4 2010-09-25 20:26:28

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#5 2010-09-25 20:38:37

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#6 2010-09-25 21:32:09

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#7 2010-09-25 21:55:37

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#8 2010-09-25 22:17:44

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#9 2010-09-25 22:22:21

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#10 2010-09-25 22:48:09

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#11 2010-09-25 23:03:52

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#12 2010-09-25 23:42:16

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#13 2010-09-26 00:14:35

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#14 2010-09-26 07:09:35

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#15 2010-09-26 08:38:59

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#16 2010-09-26 08:56:43

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#17 2010-09-26 11:05:30

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#18 2010-09-26 13:10:49

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#19 2010-09-26 14:36:59

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#20 2010-09-26 15:29:28

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#21 2010-09-26 16:11:17

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#22 2010-09-26 18:06:46

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#23 2010-09-29 07:55:53

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

#24 2010-09-29 11:20:24

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#25 2010-09-29 14:55:30

Re: Best USB Flash Distro?

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