One pendrive for all PC (Intel/AMD) computers

[Nio Wiklund]

Hi Andre,

Nice to see you here again. I notice that your tutorial thread at the
Ubuntu Forums is attracting many readers :-)

Yes I know there are advantages with ext partitions and how to tweak
them for optimal performance and lifetime on a pendrive, but I didn't
want to make the setup too complicated. You may be right, that there are
enough advantages with ext filesystems, so that I should store the
isofiles there (and have only a small fat32 partition to allow for UEFI
booting).

Anyway, pendrives are often slow, and I have found that rsync behaves
much better than zsync, when the target drive for updating is a
pendrive. I think this is true also with ext filesystems.

One big advantage is that there is no need for copying/cloning/flashing
from the internal drive to the pendrive. The slowness of the internet
connection matches quite well the slowness of a USB 2 connection, so you
don't lose much time anyway.

Fragmentation is another reason to avoid fat 32. I guess I have to watch
out for that, but as long as the iso files remain about the same size
and the file system is far from full, that should be a small problem in
this case.

I'm thinking about the casper-rw partition. Could it be used for the iso
files in a convenient way? Maybe - and it is better to have few
partitions, when the drive is small.

Best regards
Nio


Den 2015-06-24 14:35, Andre Campos Rodovalho skrev:
> Hey Nio, you can use ext4 partition and grub2 for a BIOS boot. (This
> might allow you to zsync, for testing..)
> 
> Another option might be to create a first "boot" partition with
> GPT+FAT32, but set up GRUB2 to load images in a second ext4 partition,
> (where the ISO files will be stored).
> 
> I know this should work, but I had no time to test it out yet...
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> 
> 2015-06-19 15:43 GMT-03:00 Nio Wiklund <nio.wiklund at gmail.com
> <mailto:nio.wiklund at gmail.com>>:
> 
>     Hi again :-)
> 
>     There is one minor edit:
> 
>     I wrote 'You can even zsync the Lubuntu daily iso file directly into the
>     pendrive for iso-testing.' That was to promise too much. I tried, and
>     found that zsync is slow with a slow drive and uses some features of an
>     ext file system while we are using fat32. It is better to use *rsync*
>     (which is also an alternative in the instructions for iso-testing. I
>     made this script for 'wily-desktop-i386.iso',
> 
>     --------------------------------------------------------------
>     echo "***** get/update iso file with  rsync:"
>     rsync -tzhhP
>     rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/lubuntu/daily-live/current/wily-desktop-i386.iso
>     <http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/lubuntu/daily-live/current/wily-desktop-i386.iso>
>     .
> 
>     echo "
>     ***** check md5sum:"
>     wget -O md5sums
>     http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/daily-live/current/MD5SUMS
>     grep wily-desktop-i386.iso md5sums>md5sum-desktop
>     md5sum -c md5sum-desktop
>     --------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>     You need space for two versions of the iso file (plus a little extra
>     margin). The old one is not wiped until the new one is complete.
> 
>     Best regards
>     Nio
>