HOW TO Install Lubuntu on USB Drive

[raskalnickoff]

First off, thanks this was quite helpfull and just what I was chasing.

I used an old Lubuntu 10.10 install CD and attempted to partition my USB to 8GB ext4 “\”, 4GB ext4 “\home” and 4GB swap. But every partition had ~4 bytes added or taken from it so they none of them were nice round numbers.


After installing the OS I restarted the PC and ran the performance test, then restarted a few more times. Seems best to consistently keep the USB in the same slot otherwise it resets the boot order and occasionally boots Windows. Also I can only use the GRUB to start XP on the computer I used to install Lubuntu, all the others say serial number not found.

I've sucessfully updated this to Lubuntu 12.10, but I havent been able to reformat my /home drive so that it is visable to windows. Any ideas on how I should try this?

removingthe lable and reformatting to fat32 hasn't helped, maybe it needs to be the first partition?

Other than that; Is there a way to stop windows from asking to format my USB all the time?

[oldfred]

If you are going to have a separate /home, it has to be Linux format. But for a small USB flash drive of 32GB or less I would not have a separate /home.

Windows only sees the first partition. So that is why you cannot use it with Windows and probably why Windows wants to reformat it. Windows does not see Linux formatted partitions.

If you have a fair amount of RAM I would also not create swap or keep it small and set swapiness so it is not used much.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sw...%20change%20it?
I prefer sleep and shutdown to hibernate.
'Dynamic Swap Space Manager' from the Ubuntu Software Center

[C.S.Cameron]

You can have the first partition FAT32 or NTFS, so both Windows and Linux can see it, then put / on the second partition and /home on the third.

Then you can move stuff you wish to be available to both operating systems from /home to the first partition.

[raskalnickoff]

Thanks, I’d forgotten how helpful and quick Linux forums were.

Well since the main reason for a windows accessible partition is to avoid accidentally formatting the drive and I can’t use it as a home directory I may as well make is small, 512MB should be fine.
It’s not likely I will use hibernation on a flash drive, and although I may be using some 7GB database files on a PC with only 2GB of RAM. Plus it sounds fairly simple to create a swap file which should work as well as a partition anyway (if I decide I need it after all). This should give me plenty of room to trial Steam if the open Beta is indeed available next week.

I changed my mind again and made a 930MiB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive. This worked because it is logically the first partition (/dev/sdb1), even though physically it isn’t. This leaves exactly 14336MiB (14GB neat) at the front of the drive and I made that all ext4 for my OS install. (sometimes this is recorded as 15GB, sometimes13.8GiB I probably should have reformatted the entire drive at some point)

Also incidentally the boot times on my 5 year old PC were roughly
Lubuntu 10.04 3min 30sec
XP pro (HDD) 1min 25 sec
Lubuntu 12.10 0min 50sec
And on a 6 month old laptop with Win7 everything went from the GRUB loader to login screen in ~20seconds.

So all is now working well on 3 fundamentally different hardware systems.
(After changing the theme, resetting boot orders again & resetting the screen resolution on my 2 screen PC)
I’m quite impressed.

[purplegreen]

Hello amjjawad,

Thank you for this brilliant guide. I'm trying to install Lubuntu 13.04, including boot loader, onto a USB stick.

I was wondering it's also possible to "Encrypt the [L]Ubuntu installation for security", i.e full USB drive encryption rather than just the home folder encryption option?

Thanks.

[amjjawad]

Hello amjjawad,

Thank you for this brilliant guide. I'm trying to install Lubuntu 13.04, including boot loader, onto a USB stick.

I was wondering it's also possible to "Encrypt the [L]Ubuntu installation for security", i.e full USB drive encryption rather than just the home folder encryption option?

Thanks.

Thank you for your nice comment and welcome to Ubuntu Forums

I'm still alive, I'm sorry for the late reply but I don't login here like I used to do. Real Life and other Lubuntu Activities outside the wall of Ubuntu Forums

You can encrypt the Home Folder but I assume you have read my notes?
This approach is not for day-to-day use unless you have a High Speed USB Drive and not 4GB or 8GB Flash Drive.

As for FULL installation encryption? I'm not sure what do you mean by that?
Maybe if you could please explain what exactly are you trying to achieve, I may be able to help

Thank you and I'm glad this one was helpful.

I guess I need to create new one with new screenshots but I just don't have the time. Too much tasks, no time.

[purplegreen]

Hi amjjawad,

Thank you for the warm welcome!

I'm relatively new to the world of Ubuntu/Lubuntu etc., so apologies if my question wasn't as clear as it should of been. I have a high speed 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive that I'd like to install Lubuntu on using the method detailed in your guide, but with one customization: full drive encryption (rather than just home folder encryption).

You can see an example of this option in the [L]Ubuntu installation options menu here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/1...isk-encryption (I'm not sure if that link will show up as I'm a new forum user, if it doesn't just Google "Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Full Disk Encryption" for an EFF blog article detailing what I'd like to achieve, if possible).

I thought that maybe the answer was to use a different format when formatting the drive (step 13b of your guide), but I'm not sure...

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

[Svante65]

I would like to know something about full encryption as well.
Having a Lubuntu installation on a USB key is not very save unless it's encrypted.

[sudodus]

I would like to know something about full encryption as well.
Having a Lubuntu installation on a USB key is not very save unless it's encrypted.

You can follow these instructions for the alternate iso file (yes, they are instructions for testing, but work well also for someone who 'only' wants to install it)

http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/testcases/1439/info

[Svante65]

It looks like running the command sudo swapoff -a before installation solves the problem.
It did for me