USB booting :: Storing files on USB



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It strikes me that using DSL, and indeed certain other distros, on a USB stick is a bit...strained, since they're designed for the rather limited environment of a CD.

Yes, DSL is a live CD. Yes, DSL is designed to operate in a nomadic fashion. That isn't a limitation, for many users it's a feature.

A persistent home gives you the benefits of the nomadic/CD-based system with your own files located on one partition.

As far as being able to mount your device in another operating system, you would require filesystem support on the other OS. DSL's USB-HDD script sets the persistent home partition in FAT, iirc (been a while since I've booted from USB).
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Yes, DSL is a live CD. Yes, DSL is designed to operate in a nomadic fashion. That isn't a limitation, for many users it's a feature.


Sorry, I wasn't trying to knock it--just that using a writeable USB stick is clearly going to be different from using a live WORM disk like a CD.

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As far as being able to mount your device in another operating system, you would require filesystem support on the other OS. DSL's USB-HDD script sets the persistent home partition in FAT, iirc (been a while since I've booted from USB).


Sorry? I can mount the USB stick in other operating systems. It's FAT formatted, so I just plug it in and carry on. Unless you mean the KNOPPIX image, but I don't need to access that.

I've had a quick play around, and it seems that persistent home does not do what I'm after. You can only pass it a device name, which has two problems:
1) The device can change, depending on how it's booted.
2) It's already mounted the device, so it tries to remount it and then fails.
Also, as was pointed out, various programs are going to try to write files to ~/.*, which is going to cause unnecessary strain on the USB stick. So, to revise slightly what I'd like to do:

I'd like to symlink from ~/something to a folder such as /cdrom/cargo, and make that folder writeable to the normal user. I'd like this to all happen automatically. So:
-Where can I put a script to run at boot and set up the symlink? (I'm guessing this is quite simple, I just don't know the answer...)
-How can I set a subfolder of /cdrom to be writeable to user dsl? As I remember, chown and chmod said I didn't have permission, even when run as superuser.

Thanks all!
It not solely WORM. Stating such shows that you do not undertand  DSL.
If you use the standard provided usb-hdd install script you have two partitons. The first, larger one, vfat, is owned by user dsl, the second one is an ext2 owned by root.

If you know *nix permisssions then you know you can write to which you have permission. We do not run everything as root here.

Writing constantly on a pendrive is never a good idea.

The first partition that I mentioned is used both as WORM, only for the large static mydsl extensions in the mydsl directory, and as a floppy to write once upon shutdown. This saves dramatically on writes to the flash device.

However, should you choose to setup your pendrive otherwise then that is your choice and YMWV
Quote (roberts @ April 09 2008,23:56)
It not solely WORM. Stating such shows that you do not undertand DSL.

No, I got it for the first time a few days ago and have been playing around with it. I don't claim that I understand it. A CD-R, however, is a WORM disk--that much is inarguable.

I didn't use the USB-HDD installation script. I followed the instructions on the wiki for setting up DSL-embedded on a USB flash drive. This leaves me with a single partition (I did try modifying it for two partitions, but when something failed to work, I opted to return to a single partition). Is it possible to have a user-writeable folder on the same partition, or is the only way to achieve this to separate it into two partitions?

I am well aware that we do not run everything as root. I never said I did or intended to.

I would like to write files to a pendrive. This is what they were designed for. I appreciate that perhaps there are ways to enhance their lifetime, but I don't think it will suffer unduly from me writing files to it.

I can't help but feel that the mood has got somewhat confrontational. I'm sorry about this. I understand what I want to do, and I do not think it is an entirely stupid idea. If you are uncertain what I mean, I am happy to try to clarify.
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Is it possible to have a user-writeable folder on the same partition, or is the only way to achieve this to separate it into two partitions?

Yes, you can have a user writeable folder on a single partition.

The current "install to usb" menu in dsl makes two partitions as stated previously, but you can manually make a single fat/fat32 partition and boot using syslinux or a single ext2 partition and boot using extlinux and no doubt (I haven't tried) you could also use grub to boot either of these partitions.

See here
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