SLAX on USB Drive

Squashfs is non-writable and takes a ton of RAM (files must be stored in RAM as they are uncompressed). They were completely necessary when we were booting of CD as we did not have a lot of room to work with. The non-writable part was no big deal since CD's are non-writable anyway.

Modern flash devices can be purchased in 4, 8, 16, and 32+ GB sizes. USB based HDD's are available in any size that a standard HDD can be purchased at. With that much space, there is no longer an advantage to using squashfs as there is plenty of room on the flash drive for a Linux system, several applications and storage space for home directories. Why are there no "portable" Linux distros that reside completely uncompressed that boot to a bootable USB flash-based Linux system?

**EDIT** If Mandriva 2008 does not use a compressed file system, I may have to give it a try. I had tried it a few years ago, but all it did was allow for separate home directory that had to be manually set up after booting the system.

You mean like on the Eee PC?

Quoting:Why are there no "portable" Linux distros that reside completely uncompressed that boot to a bootable USB flash-based Linux system?

Quoting:You mean like on the Eee PC?

No, I think he means like "Mandriva Flash 2008". See details at link

http://mandriva.com/en/product/mandriva-flash-2008

Sorry tracyanne, I beat you to it.

Quoting:Sorry tracyanne, I beat you to it.

Bugger.

ArcherB, for one it is quite possible to install to flash drive without using squashfs and there are many how-to's out there to use to accomplish the goal. I have done it with Debian and came in at just under 300 meg without actually paying much attention to truly slimming it down.

Another point is, it's pretty much a niche. Yeah it's kind of fun on the geek scale, however a liveCD and a thumbdrive accomplish the same goal, leaving you the whole thumbdrive for storage. Then when the next newest LivCD comes along, or you really want to give a different one a spin, your files are still there and accessible.

I'm not saying it cant be done, it can. Nor am I saying that there isn't a tailored distro or two out there, because there are. I am saying that for the most part the geek factor is greater than the practicality. Maybe that will change in the future, one never knows, but for the moment the situations where that would be preferable are pretty slim.

This looks like a nice successor to SquashFS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E2compr

I wonder why nobody uses it, since it provides compression, backwards compatibility with existing uncompressed e2fs FSes, and write support. Might try it though.

This looks like a nice successor to SquashFS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E2compr

I wonder why nobody uses it, since it provides compression, backwards compatibility with existing uncompressed e2fs FSes, and write support. Might try it though.

By the way: Does anybody know if booting / running a Live-system from USB (2.0) is faster than running it from CD? If nobody knows, it might be interesting to try to 'benchmark' it.

hkwint, it is alot faster to run off of USB than CD.

Quoting:hkwint, it is alot faster to run off of USB than CD.

That's what I think, too. Faster transfer speeds and, most of all, *no seek time* :) But, I'm an engineering type and I would have to do experiments first ;)

It's faster read times. Writing is considerably slower.

I installed Slackware to flash, just for giggles. I used ext2 so journaling wouldn't interfere, but I think I could have installed it faster with a pencil writing 1's and 0's.

Quoting:ut I think I could have installed it faster with a pencil writing 1's and 0's.

It's not that slow installing to a Flash drive. I installed MCNLive and Ubuntu to a Flash drive (I'm using MCN) and it was no slower than writing the sam size files to a Flash drive.

The only problem I have is that the Flash drive won't boot on Dual Core machines.

> The only problem I have is that the Flash drive won't boot on Dual Core machines.

LOL, if that's your only problem then life is good.

Quoting:Writing is considerably slower.

Errr, to a CD? :D

jezuch: The CD takes less than 5 minutes to burn.

Installing Slackware to flash took over 3 hours. I don't know exactly how long, because I decided to just let it run overnight while I slept.

Quoting:Installing Slackware to flash took over 3 hours.

Huh.

It took me 5 minutes to do MCNLive (it has an install script that does it for you) and 20 minutes to do Ubuntu (because I did it manually following the Howto on the web)

Quoting:The CD takes less than 5 minutes to burn.

Yes, but after it's burnt, it's cast in plastic. With USB stick you can enjoy random writes after you boot the image, not so with a live CD. Even if it's slower than to some other mediums, you should be happy it's writable at all :) [yes, I know that rewritable CD's exist, but they require some ultra-special handling at the recorder level, so it doesn't count]