Needed fully functional [NOT 'Live'(sic)] Linux on USB stick - was [Re: Ubuntu on pendrive]

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Wed Feb 1 23:45:06 UTC 2012


On 1 February 2012 22:05, Default User <hunguponcontent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I went back and looked at the 8gb flash drive in question.  According to
> gparted:
>
> 7.4gb total space
> 3.5gb main partition (ext4)
> 3.9gb extended partition, including
>     3.9gb linux-swap partition
> 1gb unallocated space

That doesn't add up - it's a total of 8.4GB...?

Do you mean a gigabyte of free space or a megabyte?

> Of the main partition, 2.93gb are used, and 576 mb are unused.  That's after
> applying all current updates.
>
> That does leave room to breathe, especially if the swap partition is shrunk
> to free up more space.

Definitely, yes.

> My mistake.  (Always check your work.)

:¬)

> BTW, I don't know why the install program set up a 4gb swap partition.  That
> might be excessive.

Of my yes. If you have enough RAM, I would remove the swap partition
altogether. I find the system will run quite happily with a few apps
open in 512MB with no swap at all. Swap can very quickly wear out
Flash media. And removing the swap needs no reconfig - if you want to
avoid an error at startup, just remove the relevant line from fstab.

(You could do this /first/ as a dry run to check it will run happily
without swap, of course.)

If this worked, you could either expand root or change the former swap
partition into a /home partition with a modest amount of fiddling. :¬)

> So, I guess an 8gb device can be used after all.  But I was not able to use
> a 4gb drive, it ran out of space.

That I can believe - you will only get about 3.75G of usable space at
best and that is a tight squeeze. Lubuntu or something would probably
do it.

> And note that a FAT formatted partition somewhere on the flash drive would
> make sharing data with Windows users easier.

Very true.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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