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

[Wolf Geldmacher]

Hi Theo,

I'd like to second Dani's suggestion to do a plain install instead.

I've just done a plain install of Swiss-Remix 9.04 treating the (8GB) USB 
Stick like a hard drive attached to USB. This works and results in a system 
that is faster and also updatabe/patchable with a lot less waste of space: 
the r/w live-system I previously had on the same stick (and for me the 
supplied USB install on the Swiss-Remix DVD "just worked") could not be 
brought to the current patch level - it ran out of space way before 
finishing.

One additional remark - when doing it this way make sure that the root FS
is mounted with the "relatime" or "noatime" option in /etc/fstab - otherwise
you might find that you are wearing the memory stick too fast.

Cheers,
Wolf

Am Monday 19 October 2009 11:44:57 schrieb 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