Bootable vs Portable

[andygates]

Yesterday's overtime was made bearable by building and tweaking a bootable Ubuntu Linux setup on my shiny new 8Gb USB stick.  It was alternately straightforward and vexing: when I tried to be clever, it all went titsup; when I left it alone it was great - and I mean really great.  Example: "full visual effects" was a sumptuous bouncy delight out of the box, but when I updated the graphics drivers, it died.  Bah!  I broke it three times, the last one downloading "all system updates" and choking the reserved disk space; even deleting the junk left me with a crufty interrupted mess.

The lesson here is that there's more than one way to skin a snuffleupagus:  Ubuntu Live Peristent on a stick is not a full desktop install, kids, don't treat it like one - it's a demo CD with a memory.  Portable Linux looks like a much better way of doing it, this time it's a 'proper' install, no reserved faux diskspace to run out of while your phonebook wiki is tapdancing next door in a 4-Gb empty ballroom.

Question is, is a bootable stick anything more than a geek toy?  Most of my world is Windish - I'm only exposed to other stuff when I choose to be.  Perhaps just a big ol' encrypted bucket and a stack of portable apps is the way forward instead. 

Comments

[shifty-176.livejournal.com]

SSH is not installed as part of XP, or at least I've never found it. I once had my Linux box stop responding, and had to download PuTTY to a Windows machine and use it to login via the network to shut down cleanly. That made me feel I'd finally achieved something in the learning curve.

Still, I know what Andy means. Most of my home stuff is Linux, but at work I'm just a user, so I get no choice. At home, I'm running a hybrid network of XP/Mac/Linux, with occasional IRIX thrown in for fun. There's no accounting for that in a work environment. I've never bothered with the bootable USB stick since the most I do on a pc at work is giggle at the corporate website, answer a few emails, and write the odd programme tech requiremets or a simple spreadsheet. Nearly all of my real work involves embedded/dedicated systems which bear no resemblance to pcs at all. Ubuntu onna stick would only ever be a toy.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Well, after a few tries, I've got cross: Ubuntu keeps downloading drivers that degrade performance (wut?) and persistence is patchy. But the killer is how badly-behaved it is with USB sticks: TrueCrypt will die and permanently lock one of its limited number of mounting slots if you close the lid of your laptop. It "just works" under Windows, and it's how I encrypt my stuff.

I've ended up splitting an 8Gb stick into half and half, encrypted and not: the good stuff is scrambled, the rest of the space is there for work drivers and the like.

I still want to do a bootable Linux stick, but it's now relegated to a curiosity and a way to keep at least a minimal hand on those skills. Ubuntu has me cross. Any recommendations for a lightweight USB-installable that won't make me turn green and burst my shorts?