Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Whew ... That's a nice endorsement, dibl! I'm out of breathe, though, having held it all through your account & hoping the story had a happy ending & not sure what I'd do if it didn't
Nice work there! Thanks, dibl.

[Detonate]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Hey dibl, have you looked at OzOS? It's an Enlightenment desktop built on Xubuntu.

http://cafelinux.org/xubuntuforums/i...opic,16.0.html

[dibl]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Hey dibl, have you looked at OzOS? It's an Enlightenment desktop built on Xubuntu.

http://cafelinux.org/xubuntuforums/i...opic,16.0.html

Huh -- interesting! I didn't even know there was a Xubuntu forum.

Well, if it works on Xubuntu, I assume it would also work on a Kubuntu system, right?

I think the E17 desktop is cool, in a spartan kinda way. Probably not a bad choice for USB stick systems.

Thanks!

[MoonRise]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

I tried ELive. It was weird. Tried getting help and wasn't meet with "open' arms, especially after mentioning Kubuntu.

Interesting about Xubuntu there. I have it on an old system here that I originally had ELive on. Hmmmm.

Yes, I've found Q's Instructions very well written.

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

I just want to point out something, in case:
kernel /capser/vmlinuz etc ... ramndisk_size=1048576
That ramdisk is only just that: a Ram Disk set in RAM to be used by the loaded OS. It's set for an upper limit (so it seems) of space (apparently) dynamically allocated.
Expressed in units (blocks) of 1K = 1024 bytes
=>
1048576 = 1 GB (= (2**20 )(1024) = 2**30)

- - - - - - - - - -

About wearout (of the flash drive, not the how-to writer) ...

Can someone (dibl?) please post the goods on this, the scoop, something defintive along the lines of actual testing. I'm familiar with all the theoretical stuff that's be calculated on it, but there doesn't seem to be much else.

K0LO pointed me at ext3, he uses it with no problems under heavy use (@him, haven't seen you around for awhile, my friend – hope you don't mind my quoting you from our threads somewhere a year ago).

I replied to Death Kitten about this – CAUTION – obviously it is only IMO!!!

Reply #119 (above) @ Death Kitten
About flash drive wearout, much of that is opinion. I'm not aware of hard studies proving details about wearout using actual flash drives (versus theoretical talk). I know users who claim it's not an issue for them, and they use their live stick all the time, for two years and running. I know one reliable, credible source who had dinner with an Intel-tech manager who told my source that wearout is not at all an issue, that the flash drive should last a very long time, and not to worry, and to find something else to worry about. Of course, any of these devices is subject to normal degradation, errors, damage, and plain old "wearing out" (like the mechanical stuff in them, the metal port connector, etc.). Look at the failure rates of hard disk drives as they age--everyone knows someone who has it happen every now and then. As for the cyrius link, well, that's pretty technical stuff; and he admits there are trade-offs (see his comment/caution at the very end). You might experiment with some/all/combinations of those things until you drive yourself nuts; even then, how do you setup the experiment, measurements, and assess results?

As for ext3, I started using it because it fixed that nasty bug in 8.04 that many of us had. Another expert here, K0LO, advised me to try it, and it worked for me. Journaling does have a cost--writes--but it also has benefits--safety of the filesystem. Frankly, maybe ext2 is OK. Even more frankly, I really don't know and I don't know how any one else can definitively know (w/o more actual--not theoretical--evidence/studies). I use ext3 and clone my flash drives and maintain the clone up to date and backup important data (to other flash drives or CDs etc.).
(Emphasis added)

Maybe you might post the wearout question in the forum somewhere (under Linux Other?) just to see the kind of opinions you get and if anyone has knowledge of recent actual studies/evidence.

I made some comments about wearout under Puppy on a UFD in my how-to here:
How To Make GRUB Thumb Drive
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3081748.0
Puppy Linux on USB Flash Drive (UFD) Reply #9.
(toward the end of that; BUT I'm nor sure what to believe now)

However, at this time, I personally am not concerned about the issues. But, YMMV.
{End quote @ D-K]

[MoonRise]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

As far as wear out. I've used Puppy on my cheap, and I mean cheap, memstick for nearly two years now. No signs of wear, though they do have a mechanism in place that delays writes to it because of the "supposed" wear out. Though I can say I have had problems with actual hard drives in less time, so I say it still falls in line with "Back Up Your Data". Nothing is 100% in the electronic world. To believe so is only setting yourself up for disappointment (IMO).

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Yes, agree.
Also, as you indicated, Puppy does pride itself on making extra special efforts to minimize writes to the stick, as explained at their site and as linked to in my Puppy How-To (under building a GRUB flash drive):

How To Make GRUB Thumb Drive
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3081748.0
=> Puppy Linux on USB Flash Drive (UFD) Reply #9.

Also, if you make a Live persistent flash drive, back the whole thing up now and then, simply by cloning it to an identical flash drive (as explained above somewhere in my stuff here). Cloning downside: cost; it does cost to clone; insignificant if it's just a 2 or 4 GB drive, but more so with 8+GB. CAUTION: my method uses the dd command -- inexperienced users::: please be very careful with that! => Must know your devices /dev/sdx's very well or you WILL destroy (all or part of) your system.

[dibl]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

I thought maybe I could come up with a crisp answer on the "journalling on solid-state media" question, but it's not coming out that way. I bought an Asus Eee PC last spring, which has a SSD, and on that forum there are a zillion posts on the topic, but they are 99% opinions and guessing. Moreover, I can't find the one thread where an engineer offered some respectable calculations -- I'm not sure whether it's gone, or I'm just incompetent to find it. The basic things I think I learned are these:

- Flash memory devices typically include a controller that provides hardware-level wear levelling
- What you don't want is a continual writing to a single block of media -- you want it spread around
- ext3, ntfs, reiserfs, xfs, etc. all tend to beat on the same media area with their journalling function
- ext3 does have tunable parameters, including "commit=" and "dirty_writebacks", that let you slow the journalling way down
- ext2 and FAT don't do the journalling thing, but FAT is a little less robust than ext2
- ext2 with a periodic fsck is probably the best you can do, unless you want to play with the ext3 journalling options

Here are some links that seem to offer a bit of objective information:

See 8Geee's post here:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=23121&p=2

and also:

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/linux-on-flash.html

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Yes, those references and calculations are typical. Death Kitten ran into the cyrius link, too. Most stuff I see concludes that wear-out is real, but for most users would not happen for a very long time and even then under sustained usage conditions, like the guy in your link that figured he'd have 25 years to go. Hard to tell. Most people, I would think, will toss their flash drives after, say, 5 years, and start fresh anyway, especially as prices drop, or some new technology will supersede, rendering the issue moot. You would think that we'd start hearing about it, though, from folks experiencing flash drive deaths. There's another issue, though, that's even more disconcerting, and that's how one updates the OS/kernel as updates are offered. That is not entirely clear or straightforward, I don't think, yet.

I added this comment in the partitioning section of Reply #54:


>>> Wear-out? If you are concerned about flash drive wear-out, you may format the partitions ext2 rather than ext3. I have no hard empirical evidence on wear-out, either way. => google it.

-----
Thanks for your ideas and links on it.


Added thought:
Look at the very low rate of data retrieval from floppies that have been in storage. I suspect the issue is true for CDs, too, but with a much better data integrity rate. There's lots of issues like this in this game that users should think about. As usual, if it is important, then best to make duplicates (or more) -- make back-ups, like cloning your flash drive every now and then, and certainly backup your personal data (if not your settings and configurations).

[dibl]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

>>> Wear-out? If you are concerned about flash drive wear-out, you may format the partitions ext2 rather than ext3. I have no hard empirical evidence on wear-out, either way. => google it.

I concur, Mike. For my Eee PC, my usage probably doesn't average 3 or 4 hours per week, so it will end up as obsolete dumpster food long before the SSD wears out. For USB sticks, the only one I've ever lost went through the washing machine.

It also occurs to me that, with the slower overall performance of SSD and flash memory such as found on USB sticks, one wants as few processes running as possible, so that also argues for a non-journalling filesystem, IMO.

[MoonRise]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

especially as prices drop, or some new technology will supersede, rendering the issue moot.

Exactly, and again, Hard Drives are no different. If a hard drive wrote to the same area repeatedly it too would wear out, and they do.

[MoonRise]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

only one I've ever lost went through the washing machine.

Actually I did that and it also went through the dryer. Guess what. It's still going.

[JohanLingen]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Trying to build a livestick using post #54;

I can get past the grub menu and it actually starts initializing hardware (the loader is still going from left to right and back). After a minute or two I am dropped to ASH:

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu6) built-in shell (ash)
...
(initramfs)


Notes:
- I copied my 8.04 /boot/grub/ directory to the usb stick
- I chose to use ext2 filesystem
- The boot flag is set and the labels are correct
- I can confirm that the downloaded 8.10 iso is correct (md5) (and I assume that after two tries, copying the files from the iso to the stick should also be fine)

Do you have any idea what is going wrong?

[Qqmike]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

Did you do the work using GUI (in 8.04); i.e., did you copy the CD files to the flash drive in GUI using Konqueror or Dolphin?
If so,
did you copy the hidden files, too?
(View > Show hidden files)
That would be (I think) just
/.disk


Sometimes, typing exit at the initramfs prompt will tell you something.

[JohanLingen]

Re: Build a LIVE Kubuntu Flash Drive, How-To

I copied files using the CLI.

You were right, the /.disk directory wasn't present on the flash drive.

After copying this directory, it worked perfectly!
Too bad I broke it by downloading upgrades...

FYI to update the manual:
1) Gparted in Kubuntu 8.04 does not show an option to change labels. Instead I used

sudo e2label /dev/sdX1 kubuntu810
sudo e2label /dev/sdX2 casper-rw

2) cp -r ../* does not copy hidden files, instead use

sudo cp -RT /media/CDfiles/ /media/kubuntu810/

(notes: capital R and T; do not append * to source)