Linux on a USB Stick

I enjoy Linux. Not because I hate Windows (it has its uses), but because I like getting my "hands dirty" with coding and scripts. Windows and its proprietary way of handling things in ways that, to me anyway, don't make sense, doesn't lend itself to having fun and playing around. But with kids, work, and the other trappings of adulthood, I had forewent the hands-on nature of the Unix world and went 100% windows.

I have a homebuilt PC with a nothing-fancy setup. Inexpensive motherboard, inexpensive CPU, and enough RAM to get a decent job done. It had Windows 10 and all my favorite games on it. Well, a few months ago the hard disk crapped out on me and it's been little more than a large paperweight ever since.

Given that I had a laptop as well, there was little motivation to fix the desktop PC. I'm away from home 60+ hours a week for work, and time for hobbies wasn't much of a priority. The laptop let me get online, play a couple games, and go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Then my wife declared manifest destiny on the laptop and took it for her Pampered Chef business. Suddenly without a PC, I was forced to engage in such Rennaisance activities as reading words on paper, rather than on screen. My word, I was an oil lamp away from being Amish. The antiquity of it all!

Then it occured to me - why not make a live USB stick of Linux? It would be just fine for browsing Facebook and Reddit, which is pretty much all I do online anyway. So I went with Lubuntu, a lightweight, scaled down port of Ubuntu, which is in turn a port of my preferred distribution, the mighty Debian. Weighing in at around 250MB downloaded, it fit fine on a USB stick I had found behind my desk.

A few days playing around was all that was needed to lure me back into the world of 'nix. Soon I was all over Synaptic, downloading all my favorite programs from back when. I was in text-mode heaven! One problem, though - when the PC shuts off, all that goes bye-bye.

Knowing I'd invariably suffer a power outage or have to unplug the PC at some point, I decided to make a permanent install on the PC. However, I live in a small town where anything basic periferal devices must be mail ordered. What to do? Then it dawned on me - just permanently install the OS to another USB stick. Duh.

Off to the evil blue-box store it was. I picked up a 32GB stick for about $12, which seamed like a reasonable price for the project. A quick search online on how best to do it was obviously simple - just unplug the malfunctioning hard disk from the motherboard so that all the installer sees is the USB stick. Worked like a charm.

And here we are! I've yet to have any major problems with the setup. I did, however, put my major directories (/home, for one) in a seprate partition which can be backed up and, should I ever replace the hard drive, copied over to a more permanent install to avoid loss of data.

Perhaps I could take this a step farther and buy four of the 32GB sticks to make a RAID array... hrm.

Here are some links to websites which provided useful information in this project: