Linux mint live persistant usb for netbooks

[vampires]

Hiya have just recently started using Linux Mint, after 10 years of first Red Hat then Mandrake/Mandriva distros. It is excellent.

Just thought I would share a little of my experience with Linux mint with you all.

I wanted to try LInux Mint on the two netbooks we have, an eee pc 901 and an acer aspire one. Now I only have SSD storage on my eee and have eeebuntu running on it, so I didnt have space to dual boot, so thought a live USB pen with persistance would be the answer.

I first made just a bog standard live USB pen and used that on my eee pc it wasnt bad but not everything worked. I then made a Live USB pen with persistance loop, booted off that and decided that to get everything working I needed the eee pc kernel from www.array.org. I downloaded and installed this kernel on the persistance live USB, but could not get it to boot using the new kernel at all .

I now decided on a different tack. Having recently installed Linux Mint 6 on my laptop it was still a fairly clean install, I downloaded and installed the eee pc kernel on that, then booted into it. I then used remastersys to create a new live cd, but using the eee pc kernel.

Then using USB creator I made another persistance live USB pen, and..... I can now use linux mint on both netbooks with everything working perfectly.

The instructions for creating the live USB pens can be found on www.pendrivelinux.com

I hope that this gives others the confidence to try out some different things with Linux Mint.

Robbie

[Husse]

Welcome to Mint
The persistence part of pendrive Linux is the tricky bit, I get lots of questions about it so it's nice to hear that someone succeeds with ease....

[vampires]

Welcome to Mint
The persistence part of pendrive Linux is the tricky bit, I get lots of questions about it so it's nice to hear that someone succeeds with ease....

Hi the instructions on pendrivelinux.com are very straightforward and easy to follow, they are excellent guides.

I am finding Linux mint really easy to use, although with the debian based distro, I find I am having to learn a few differences in the file structure and command line compared to the red hat based distros I am used to. I am loving it lol.

[ezsurfer]

Well, I certainly did like Pendrive, but for me, resetting Mint on every install was definitely not exactly what I wanted. What I was looking for was Linux Mint, persistent, and modifiable.

Well, it took most of a night, but I finally figured out a/the trick.

Build yourself a standard USB drive with the instructions from pendrive regarding dual partitions. This enables the 1 GB use for OS, and the remaining space on the pendrive for data saving and the necessary locations for the persistence setup to keep data.

Once you have the 1 GB allocation with the remaining drive set up for storage, I had to follow the directions for xUbuntu and then learned to only follow some of them.

The 8.04 xUbuntu directions for a persistent drive, and changing out the xubuntu link throughout, and leaving off the write over of the initrd.gz file. This leaves Linux Mint 7 installed, I have repeated the set-up and boot with no issues, and the PC comes up on the pen drive with everything exactly as I have it. Now, I can really take my desktop to any tech support call.

And as pointed out earlier in posts, I can already enable Compiz, set time and locations, and have everything working flawlessly to really show what an excellent OS this really is.

So, if you already have a Linux Mint pen drive, and you want persistence, you really only need to run one of the commands from pendrive, and it will give you the persistence from the boot menu of the USB

Boot the host CD (Linux Mint, hopefully!), insert your USB Mint pendrive, then from a terminal,

cd /media/mint (Mint is the partition Label of my pendrive)
sudo rm syslinux.cfg
wget pendrivelinux.com/downloads/mint/syslinux.cfg

That's all, reboot you pendrive, on initial USB boot, it will stop at

boot:

Simply tap enter, and select the first option, which should be Linux Mint Gloria with persistency.
Edit away! Oh, one thing, IF you restart and do not shutdown, you will need to pop out and back in the persistent drive on the prompts, or the boot on the PC will not "see" the drive, at least for mine, it works this way, and it's repeatable.
On a full shutdown, I can leave in the pendrive, and Mint comes right back with persistence!


ezsurfer

[finnbakk]

I use Mint on my Lenovo Laptop, and it's just a great distro. I also for a while had MInt 7 Gloria installed on my Acer Aspire One 110, with 8 GB SSD disk and 512 MB Ram. But I'm back to using #Crunchbang on the netbook. Everything worked out of the box with Mint 7, but with Gnome it was too slow for my AAO with 8GB SSD / 512 MB Ram. #Crunchbang is very easy to install, sound and Wifi works oob, and it uses Openbox as GUI, it has a very small footprint.
I wish there was a version of Mint for netbooks too. Then I would have changed back to use it. But the GUI has to use a short amount of memory. UNR is also too heavy.

[Husse]

We hope to get a LXDE edition, but the dev, McLovin, does not have sufficient time to get it done fast