[Ubuntu-ch] Problems with USB-Sticks and Swiss Remix

[Theo Schmidt]

Hi Dani and all

I'm trying to make a useful Swiss Remix 9.04 USB Stick with persistent home for 
my brother-in-law who lives in Brazil. Several attempts on two different PCs 
still leave me with a not very useful solution. There are two issues: booting 
speed and persistent home:

1) Booting speed
On an older 2.8 GHz PC the booting speed is 3 minutes, just like the DVD. This 
is just acceptable. On the other PC, an ASUS Pundit, it takes 8 minutes, more 
than twice as with the DVD. With both PCs the stick is clearly processing data 
because its LED blinks rapidly, but the intitial Ubuntu screen doesn't go away 
as it usually does - it is disabled however. The progress bar (or rather the 
"non-progress" bar which just goes back and forht) doesn't come on until some 
minutes have passed. This is confusing. Daniel Stoni tells me that he hasn' had 
this problem. Any ideas?

2) Ubuntu comes with a super tool which should allow the automatic creation of 
bootable USB-Sticks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Live_USB_creator
It also offers to create a persistent home. The only trouble is, it doesn't 
work. It does create a file of the specified size called casper-rw which is 
writable and executable by all and appears to format this in some way, but any 
data stored when using the live-system isn't persistent. Dani told me it was a 
bug, but the bug appears to be in Ubuntu 8.04 and corrected since 8.04.3. There 
seem to be lots of people with this problem and numerous solutions, (most rather 
complicated). Anybody know of a simple solution for 9.04? I did try some other 
tools mentioned in 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_to_create_Live_USB_systems
UNetbootin doesn't offer persistence and in any case refused to accept my 
USB-Stick. PortableLinux only does CD, not DVD images and also doesn't accept my 
USB-Stick. (UbuntuLiveUSBcreator also complained about not being able to 
determine the partition number, but after reformatting it was OK. Reformatting 
doesn't help with the other tools.)

Again, Dani tells me he has no problems and anyway I should use a real install 
instead of a frugal install, but I prefer this for demo purposes, because you 
can't really damage a frugal install (you can damage a persistent home, of 
course). However my experience indicates that USB-media with Ubuntu are more of 
an art than a science. Any of you have better experiences? It must be possible, 
because I have never had problems with Puppy, DSL, or Lernstick 
http://www.imedias.ch/lernstick
The last in particular seems to work with any stick or SD-card and also offers a 
boot CD for those PCs which can't boot from USB.

Cheers, Theo