Install onto USB

[Liam Proven]

On 15 November 2011 20:04, Koh Choon Lin <2choonlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is this possible?
>>
>> I don't mean to make a LiveUSB stick out of an ISO. I want to put
>> 10.04 onto a USB stick and it needs a ton of updates to bring it to
>> current, which eats a lot of space on the USB stick.
>>
>> So I was wondering if you could actually /install/ Ubuntu onto a USB stick.
>
> Yes you can but why not just have a LiveUSB? I have been using it for
> years without no update, considering I have the machine up at most for
> an hour or two each session.

Because I want to update the system on the USB key to be current, so
as to have all the patches and updates installed. Building a whole new
ISO with updated files is an epic job. I've been working on it with a
colleague and we have managed it, but it seems to break various things
(e.g. CUPS and the firewall).

You can install updates on a LiveUSB built from an ISO, but the newer
files eat up user space - the space occupied by the original, older
ones inside the ISO file is not freed up. So it's very inefficient and
we'd need to use a big USB key. It was looking like this approach
would need a 16GB key or bigger.

Installing direct into an ext4 partition on a USB key, I've got the
system into about 3GB - 3.5GB with some extra apps - and still have
more than a gig of "breathing room" on / plus  2GB of free space in a
separate /home partition for user files.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508