Help creating a writable usb for a particular purpose [Solved]

[tizianomattei]

Hi all,
I kindly ask your help creating a bootable usb stick with persistency in a precise way for my purpose.

I'm a music teacher at a school (pupils 10-13 y.o.) and I'd like to tach my students to use musescore as a notational typesetting software.
Instead of installing the program on the messed up windows laptops at school (which already take forever booting and doing anything, despite being quite recent), I'd rather each pupil have a usb stick of their own, where I'd install a slightly customized MX (Musescore preinstalled, no menus visible, clean desktop...) to be used with persistency, so that everyone can "carry his computer around" and store there every file they work on.

Now I have my system already prepared, I've successfully flashed it in writable mode, tested using persist_all option and everything works as expected, except I possibly want the boot process to be as quick as possible - I don't want to choose the language & keyboard layout and the persistency option every time I boot into a machine, otherwise I'l have to do so for 20+ laptops each time and the class will get unmanageable in no time.

All I want is:
- to have the italian language, italian keyboard and Rome timezone preset as the default at boot and
- persistency option already set to persist_all
so that the only thing to do is press Enter once (or, ideally, even no boot menu shown, and an automatic boot happening with those settings).
Obviously, I'll prepare the students' sticks one by one beforehand at home.

Thank you if you can help with this project, it will be much appreciated!
Tiziano

[dolphin_oracle]

there is a save option in the menu to save your boot parameters, including the persistence mode and the language settings.

once the language settings are saved, the default option should be to boot (one enter press).

you could probably clone the usb stick onto other usb devices using something like clonezilla, preserving the persistence files and all the saved boot options, rather than repeating the setup on 20 devices.

[tizianomattei]

Thank you so much dolphin_oracle! That's exactly what I need.
I see there are two options though: grubsave and gfxsave. What's the difference?
Thank you again
Tiziano

[m_pav]

You only need to use grubsave.

When using imaging techniques to clone Live-USB's as DO mentioned, my recommendation is to use only fast USB Drives and all the same. By the way, not all USB Flash drives that are labelled as fast are fast, do some research because I've seen times like 20 minutes posted by reviewers with rockin machines which show they are using bargain basement junk drives.

I get between 11 and 20 seconds to "burn" a 2.2GB ISO to USB with MX Live USB Maker using USB-SSD in a flash drive body, and around 3-5 minutes for a USB3.1 Flash Drive that is marketed as fast. For your production run, I recommend disabling all auto-mounting first, you can re-enable it when you're done.

You could also, after booting with persistence make a personal Snapshot and use that to write your live-USBs, though you'd have to weigh up the consequences of every user having the same user name and password at install.