• rotopenguin
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    8 months ago

    I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive’s EFI.

    • Anarchistcowboy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      I see people say this a lot and I have no experience with this but I wonder why you wouldn’t use a USB nvme SSD enclosure it seems a lot easier and idk if running it over USB would limit the speed but it could preform better than a USB stick.

      • rotopenguin
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional “fix something up” or “take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do”. A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.

        Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it’ll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt’s sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.

        • Hule@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          “persistent storage” is a thing.

          But USB drives can’t endure standard Linux for long. Too many logs and other files written all the time…