I want to make a thumbdrive that boots to Mint 13, but doesnt act like a LIVE read-only distro. I want the thumb drive to act like a normal Linux build where I can add software etc and save changes. Found a reference to someone doing this with Fedora 15, but lots of info missing.

Mint 13 installer has a "Something Else" option as attached in pic, for custom installations, since the other choices never look at USB drives and only normal hard drives. So I have to use this option to install from 1 stick to another stick and the problem i ran into is not knowing what partitions are required and what size to make them? The USB thumbdrive is 8GB and Mint CLAIMS to require 5.3GB is available for install.

I havent had to manually set up Linux partitions for an install since RedHat 6.0  MANY years ago, so i figured I'd check here on what sizes to make the partitions. Also, does it make sense to have a swap partition on a thumbdrive? You can install and run without them. I was just thinking that since the system has 4GB Ram and you should make swap space = 1.5x RAM and i have 8GB thumbdrive it wouldnt work out too well eating up 6GB of my 8GB. Also I would think that performance would be degraded if the USB thumbdrive was being used as extra memory as well with a swap space which is intended for real hard drives to handle.

Also if there is an easier method than installing from a 1GB thumb drive to another 8GB to make a USB bootable read/write version of Mint 13 thumbdrive, I would be interested in going that route if there is a automatic method that works.

Thanks



[year+ old attachment deleted by admin]In many Ubuntu/Linux Mint(which is based on Ubuntu and have a lot of similarities, e.g. PPA compatibility)installers there is an official option to provide persistent software and documents:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/live-usb-install-puts-linux-thumb-drive-ease/
But this still treats the drive as a Live CD as opposed to a native install, and many have reported problems once the number of installed packages increases.
The only con I can think of to putting swap on the USB drive is the possibility of wearing out the flash memory more quickly (though your hard drive probably will suffer mechanical damage far before that happens) and the extremely limited transfer SPEED if you're using USB 2.0 as opposed to 3.0.
Not too sure about your recommendation for having 1.5x times the capacity of the physical RAM allocated to swap. (I have a VPS running Ubuntu 11.10 on the OpenVZ virtualization platform with 128M RAM, 128M swap and there aren't any stability issues with apache2, php5, fastcgi, and a couple other programs like OpenVPN and an IRC gateway, and haven't had to reboot in over a month.) I am installing Mint 14 XFCE Nadia on a netbook now, and I had to create a swap partition before it let me proceed :S
Give your idea a go! By all means. Format your USB drive and create the partitions first. Ext2 is SUPPOSED to be less weary in TERMS of read/write cycles, so try using that, and 2 GB swap space should be sufficient. Don't forget to specify the location of the GRUB bootloader- DON'T OVERWRITE YOUR HARD DRIVE'S BOOTLOADER! Make sure you're writing to the Ext2 partition you created. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing . http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

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features include; Persistence (if available) – note that casper persistence will only work with fat16 or fat32 formatted drives.

Persistent Installation
You can, if you want, create a “persistent” installation of Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions. What does this mean? Software you install and documents you create after booting this thumb drive will stay on your thumb drive. It’s a virtual computer on a drive!