Can DLS run on USB stick

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Can DLS run on USB stick
started by: satimis

Posted by satimis on Feb. 02 2006,05:29

Hi folks,

Disregarding being a Linux and unix folk for years this is my first time on DSL. I have following questions;

1) Can DSL be installed and run on USB Flash drive, If YES, any manual/instruction available

2) If YES to Q1 above
2a) Can USB Flash drive be partitioned, applying Partition-1 for DSL on USB and Partition-2 for storage

2b) If YES to 2a) above
Can partition-1 be protected to be edited only by Root/Adminstrator.

2c) If for those old PCs without boot on USB can boot floppy be created for booting purpose to run DSL on USB

3) What are;
frugal and USB-frugal

TIA

B.R.
satimis

Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 03 2006,04:05

1) Yes. Check the DSL wiki and search the forums for more information. The short answer is:
First, download the iso and burn a DSL livecd. Then boot the cd.
If BIOS supports USB-HDD booting, then choose Install to pendrive USBHDD from the menu. A single FAT partition will be created that can be used by either DSL or by MSWindows. The installation will wipe your USB drive, so back up before you do it. The DSL files will take up about 50MB of space.

If your BIOS only supports USB-ZIP booting, choose USBZIP install from the menu. A 50MB FAT partition will be created that contains the DSL files and the remainder of your USB drive will be partitioned as a EXT2 partition. Unfortuately, MSWindows refuses to allow access to the 2nd partition on a USB device so it is not possible to use the 2nd partition for storage. Also, the real ZIP drive formart only goes up to 250MB max, so it is not possible to create a single ZIP-compatible partition that is larger than 250MB in size.

There is a USB bootfloppy image in the download section. It can be used to create a boot floppy disk for older computers that do not support native USB booting. If you choose to use this boot floppy, I recommend that you do a USBHHD install for your pendrive. It is cleaner to have a single partition and USBHHD does this.

A Frugal install is a install similar to a livecd, but the files are sitting on your hard drive instead of a CD-R disk. So the behavior is the same as the livecd (base read-only compressed filesystem), but performance is faster because hard drives are more responsive than CDROM drives. It also includes a bootloader so you don't need a boot floppy or a boot cd after installation is completed.

A USB frugal install is just a frugal installation that is done on a USB pendrive instead of a internal hard drive. Frugal is IDEAL for a USB flash drive because the read-only compressed filesystem and RAMdisk mean that your flash drive is not exposed to constant writes, IE: web browser CACHE or swap file. FLASH memory has a limited number of writes before it will fail (something like 100,000 writes which can be quickly exhausted if you do a lot of web browsing), so a USB frugal install is safer for your flash drive.

For more information, search the forums and the wiki for frugal install