A writable Live USB-disk [Solved]

[FullScale4Me]

archive.org has a little box at the top - Wayback Machine. Great for reviving dead URLS.

[m_pav]

Let's not forget that little "Live-usb-storage folder that appears in the demo account homedir when running Live from a fully featured Live USB. This feature is not available when running the likes of Ventoy, Rufus or other USB image writing tool that leaves the image in r/o mode, with the exception of Ventoys own Persistence, however, Ventoys persistence is only capable of a smattering of what ours can provide.

I use the Live-usb-storage folder to save any files I created or obtained whilst in the live session. Thereafter, they will always be available for subsequent live runs, and, on any Debian type system the saved content can be accessed by simply plugging the drive in, mounting and opening the store location using a regular file manager, with the proviso they have UID=1000.

Using a USB Flash based drive which is designed specifically for Store and Transfer operations, I find the live session with persistence is sorely limited unless one uses a verified high speed device where the storage media is capable of high read/write speeds, and these are far surpassed when USB-SSD media is used. I find we are lacking content that depicts the importance of using fast media when running live, vs the low grade junk drives which can give a weak portrayal of our Live system.

[MXRobo]

OK - re-entered for Wayback Machine, enter URL in box, select a date to restore - but they may be outdated - duh?
2019
https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... tence.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000 ... tence.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20231208221 ... tence.html
--2022
https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000 ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20221202185 ... arams.html
--2023
https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000 ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20241006013 ... arams.html

[FullScale4Me]

Age is a relative thing in Linux, nothing like the 'norms' in Windows.

There are a few networking testing apps in Debian Linux core that are 'feature complete' and judged bug-free, and were last revised over 10 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if a quick search turns up some older ones.

[FullScale4Me]

OK - re-entered for Wayback Machine, enter URL in box, select a date to restore - but they may be outdated - duh?
2019
https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... tence.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000 ... tence.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20231208221 ... tence.html
--2022
https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000 ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20221202185 ... arams.html
--2023
https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000 ... arams.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20241006013 ... arams.html

Thank you, MXRobo, for bringing that back. Whoever created those spent a *lot* of time, especially those tables on the first link (1). I hope the next MX Wiki revision can repurpose some/all of it.

1) One of my first major forays into HTML tables involved tiny tables inside also tiny tables all within a bigger table. I did this to preserve vertical alignment in each cell as well as giving line wrapping boundaries tighter than what CSS 2.0 could at the time (late 1998'ish). Different screen sizes and the horrid implementations of CSS 2.0 in the web browsers popular at the time made it necessary. I wouldn't think of doing it like that now...

[operadude]

Let's not forget that little "Live-usb-storage folder that appears in the demo account homedir when running Live from a fully featured Live USB. This feature is not available when running the likes of Ventoy, Rufus or other USB image writing tool that leaves the image in r/o mode, with the exception of Ventoys own Persistence, however, Ventoys persistence is only capable of a smattering of what ours can provide.

I use the Live-usb-storage folder to save any files I created or obtained whilst in the live session. Thereafter, they will always be available for subsequent live runs, and, on any Debian type system the saved content can be accessed by simply plugging the drive in, mounting and opening the store location using a regular file manager, with the proviso they have UID=1000.

Using a USB Flash based drive which is designed specifically for Store and Transfer operations, I find the live session with persistence is sorely limited unless one uses a verified high speed device where the storage media is capable of high read/write speeds, and these are far surpassed when USB-SSD media is used. I find we are lacking content that depicts the importance of using fast media when running live, vs the low grade junk drives which can give a weak portrayal of our Live system.

Thanks for this reminder, m_pav

I spent a whole day updating, re-configuring, luckybackup-ing, snapshot-ing, re-luckybackup-ing, LUM-ing ("full featured", with encryption), initializing (password) and testing the LUMs...for my 4 MX distros (Fluxbox, KDE, Minimal, & Xfce). I seriously didn't think it would take a whole day, but then again, when I say "luckybackup-ing" (before AND after snapshots), that's across 5 separate (portable) hard drives, and a 6th "drive", the "Cloud" (Dropbox).

So, yeah, sometimes I don't want to go through the whole "persist" route when on my LU (Live USB), but might need or want to add something small, like a small .png or .txt file.

I'll keep an eye-out for that "Live USB" folder in the LU home dir

[Jakob77]

Many thanks for more contributions. :-)


It looks like there are still some important basic stuff in this I haven't understood well enough.
Thunar fooled me because it showed 8Gb available space in my home folder.
That made med believe that the Live persistence_static system constantly did a copy to another place on the disk.
However, also in Thunar, if the mouse cursor is parked on "File-system" in the side panel then the tool-tip shows 8Gb and the disk is full.

So now I have to find a more reliable theory based on hopefully (not very likely) more qualified guessing. ;-)

Here I go (learning by doing) so everybody with documentation gets their chance to disagree:

The disk size we choose (8Gb is default) at the first boot-up is all the space we get to work with (expand) internal in persistence mode.
That my disk is 450 Gb won't help much except perhaps if I maintain something that I am likely not much for.

Therefore I think it can often make good sense to install as much as possible already before the snapshot is made so it is already inside the .iso file to be used for the install.
And if the USB disk is big enough why not choose 20 Gb (all we can) for persistence.

Let's not forget that little "Live-usb-storage folder that appears in the demo account homedir when running Live from a fully featured Live USB. This feature is not available when running the likes of Ventoy, Rufus or other USB image writing tool that leaves the image in r/o mode, with the exception of Ventoys own Persistence, however, Ventoys persistence is only capable of a smattering of what ours can provide.

I use the Live-usb-storage folder to save any files I created or obtained whilst in the live session. Thereafter, they will always be available for subsequent live runs, and, on any Debian type system the saved content can be accessed by simply plugging the drive in, mounting and opening the store location using a regular file manager, with the proviso they have UID=1000.

Using a USB Flash based drive which is designed specifically for Store and Transfer operations, I find the live session with persistence is sorely limited unless one uses a verified high speed device where the storage media is capable of high read/write speeds, and these are far surpassed when USB-SSD media is used. I find we are lacking content that depicts the importance of using fast media when running live, vs the low grade junk drives which can give a weak portrayal of our Live system.

Than you very much for that reminder.
I have not tested if there is a limit to the capacity but it can sometimes be very useful instead of a data partition.


I did a shallow test to see what happened when I turned off persistence. I was right it zapped back to the original state before I did any updating.
In that test I also put some files in the Live-usb-storage folder.

And when I turned persistence_static on again the updated configuration also came back again. It was not lost.

I did not get prompted again about disk and swap as I hoped for but the files in Live-usb-storage folder were also available with persistence_static on.



****EDIT



In order to restart the prompt for making more disk-space in persistence mode and avoid destroying the configuration I could not help myself and decided to use a test computer and do a full install from my USB disk with persistence to that.
It felt a bit crazy but it worked, and then I could install the rest of the games on the test computer and make a new snapshot of the computer and give the .iso file to MX Live USB Maker that created a new Live install on the USB-disk. Did that make you feel a bit dizzy too.? lol


Afterwards I booted up a couple of times Live with persistence off, and all looked good on the new install.

Then I rebooted and turned "persistence_all" on and booted further up for the menu prompting, and this time I did NOT just go with the defaults.! ;-)

I chose 3Gb swap
And I chose 150 Gb for my home folder.
And to my surprise I could choose not only 20 Gb but a lot more for the root. I chose 40 Gb.!

That also works, so if nothing else it seems that can be one way to handle it.

[m_pav]

When running a Live USB created with MX-LUM without persistence, the remaining Live-storage volume displayed in Thunar or Dolphin will be representative of your machines RAM, not the storage media. If you watch the available space in your FileManager when running the updates check, or when installing some packages you will see the value decrease as the filespace stored in RAM consumes more system memory.

Here's another way (by example) you can use modify the Live USB if persistence scares you (not that it should)

On a machine with 8GB RAM, I booted a fully featured Live USB that I made 2 months earlier and a Debian Point release came out, so I wanted to update the Live USB to integrate the incrememtal changes. While running live, I added a few of the utilitarian techie type apps I like to use on my TechBench and added a conky I liked into /etc/skel/.conky, then set it as default. When I had finished all I wanted to do, I used MX Remaster to simply remaster the Live USB, which works its magic to produce a new /antix/linuxfs file (on the live USB) which is switched in at the next boot.

During the process of performing the upgrade and additional packages install, Thunar showed the available space drop down to 300MB remaining out of 8GB installed which concerned me at first, but the software work was done and after cleaning out the apt package lists and the apt cache, I was back at 5.9GB used, or 2.1GB available RAM. I went a little further and removed all language packs for everything but English, and used Bleachbit to remove all the additional locale entries and my available space grew by another 200MB, so all in all, I had 2.3GB of RAM left to play with.

I thought the remaster operation would fail for lack of RAM, but it did not and I ended up with a 2.7GB linuxfs vs the 2.1GB I started with. On the next boot, I ran Live Kernel Updater and switched out the older kernel for the newer one, rebooted and it was running the new kernel. I ended up installing this onto one of my machines and before I ran the installer, I removed the old kernel with MX Cleanup and the fresh install was crisp and clean, running my favourite conky on startup.

[dolphin_oracle]

work in progress, combining the antiX FAQ and some general discussion focusing on the live boot menus, persistence, remaster, and kernel updater.

https://mxlinux.org/wiki/help-antix-live-usb-system/

[Jakob77]

work in progress, combining the antiX FAQ and some general discussion focusing on the live boot menus, persistence, remaster, and kernel updater.

https://mxlinux.org/wiki/help-antix-live-usb-system/

Great.
A wonderful lot of advanced AntiX menus to test and explain. :-)
In the boot menu I guess it has to be all pure text, and it can be a challenge if there is not room for much text file in that sequence.
And there is no internet..



About the USB-Maker and MX help for the default full feature settings I think m_pav did right reminding about:

Code: Select all

~/Live-usb-storage

There is with that at least a simple full feature storage by default.
It can at first seem poor if you expect persist but it does actually open a door to a lot more.
I have for instance redirected script functionality to include ~/Live-usb-storage/bin
That makes it very easy for me to test, edit and save scripts Live, and also change a Live start up configuration script if I want to.
I guess that is all I need for a while but it can start some thoughts about "~/Live-usb-storage" as a kind of new "home", and how much more there can be redirected in a smooth kind of copy-way as a primitive alternative to the more advanced "F5 persist".



m_pav

It must have been a good looking Conky. :-)