Porteus

Hey everyone,

for the last couple of weeks I've been trying various Linux distributions as I've been looking for a distribution that can be installed to a USB drive as a persistent live system. In addition, I'd like to be able to create a separate home partition as the first partition on the drive which can be formatted as FAT32 so I can access it from Windows, too.

In the event of trying out lots of distributions I came across Porteus. I'm delighted with how fast and yet good-looking it is. I've read that it saves changes to a file, the location of which you can customise. It said that if you're using a FAT or NTFS partition, you'll have to save changes to a file while you can directly save them to the drive if you're using an ext partition.

Considering the requirements I've stated above (persistent live system with separate home partition I can access from Windows), is it possible to achieve what I want to have with Porteus? If so, how would you go about doing that?

I've searched the forums on this topic but couldn't find exactly what I'm looking for. If this topic has already been discussed, feel free to point me to the thread.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Regards,

haxxurrtje

with separate home partition I can access from Windows

Your home partition should have a linux filesystem such as ext4, using ntfs or fat for it would be asking for trouble.
There are Windows programs that can access ext4 partitions. See e.g. http://superuser.com/questions/37512/ho ... on-windows. Being a linux-only user I cannot say anything on the quality of these programs.
I would recommend keeping your data files and (Office) documents in a separate ntfs(-3g) partition, and leaving your home directory in the (ext4) persistence file.

Because NTFS supports symlinks it is better than FAT. Someday I have made symlink /home/guest pointed to my /sda4/data/home/guest, but some programs have troubles with incorrect permissions or owner (you can change them with mount option uid=guest,gid=users,fmask=000,dmask=000; 000 is example of permissions). Now instead of /home/guest symlinks I use several symlinks inside guest, and make new ones when needed from my spacefm menu ("cp -ua --parents --backup=numbered %f /mnt/sda4/data && rm -r %f && ln -s /mnt/sda4/data%f %f" or "rm -r %f && ln -s /mnt/sda4/data%f %f" - works only for one selected dir or file in this examples, else use "for f in %F"...)

haxxurrtje wrote:Considering the requirements I've stated above (persistent live system with separate home partition I can access from Windows), is it possible to achieve what I want to have with Porteus? If so, how would you go about doing that?

Sure. First format your USB drive as FAT32. Then copy the contents of a Porteus ISO to the USB drive. Note I said the contents not the ISO. Then on the USB drive read the USB_INSTALLATION.txt file. Porteus can be installed on the drive using either Windows or a Linux system.

Once Porteus is installed on the USB drive you can boot it and then partition the drive to have a ext2 partition for saving changes or create a save.dat file for saving changes on the FAT32 partition.

BTW I've never used an ext* drive.

^ As OP already on 3.2.2: Menu > System > Create Live USB (should take care of all above for OP). Suppose would be nearest thing to getting a compatible HOME directory.