Secure personal USB stick?

[Fester Bestertester]

Greetings!

Being an 'old fart', I need time as a 'casual' at a retirement home. They call it "respite", and that indeed is what it gives my wife - from dealing with my deafness and pedantry.
The home of choice (the only one in less than a day's drive away) has a computer for residents' use, a Win10 machine with extremely flaky login. Its single desktop is overloaded with icons for games and its system overloaded with all sorts of obtrusive 'utilities' that must be dismissed before any reasonable usability can be effected.
To this end, I'm needing a USB stick with latest Kubuntu with persistence. It would be VERY helpful if usb-creator-gtk had a 'persistence' option (as qqMike submitted on Nov 2, 2009, Kubi 8.x) - the 16.10 amd64 on my home desktop machine does not. I'm hoping to have a bootable USB stick can be secured, and I'd envisage it going something like this:
Bootable persistent stick as above
Personal user installed (with password, as Admin), set to boot either to CLI or GUI (My preference would be GUI).
With single Admin user, can/does the default 'root' account get locked out, leaving the personal user account (as above) the sole Admin?
This could then have my own preference of browser and mailer, with my beloved Kubuntu interface, using only the hardware and internet of the home's machine (or any other?), and be immune to pirating of personal data should it be stolen or lost.

What say, all?

[GreyGeek]

https://www.digi77.com/linux-kodachi/

[Guest]

IMHO you might be lucky with an uefi ubuntu external drive as most stations don't support legacy boot anymore.

Envoyé de mon SM-N910F en utilisant Tapatalk

[jlittle]

If the computer has USB 2 or 3, I wonder if a normal install to removable media would be a better bet.

Please, all, jump in with the drawbacks of this.

The old "bootable stick with persistent data" approach was aimed at small (in 2016) sticks with only a few GB, requiring lots of compression to fit, and decompression at every boot. With a 32 or 64 GB stick a normal install would be far faster to boot and simpler to use.

A good first step would be to make a Kubuntu Live install stick and see if you can get it to boot on the home's computer, and see how slow it is. Storing data on an internet service like Dropbox or Google Drive might be all you need.

In any case, the home's computer should be cleaned out, paved and reinstalled. I imagine that they won't listen to you, but I would feel a moral obligation to tell someone, however pointlessly.

[Qqmike]

If the computer has USB 2 or 3, I wonder if a normal install to removable media would be a better bet.
Please, all, jump in with the drawbacks of this.

I was thinking the same thing. The only issue is the issue that always exists when using someone's computer: can you get that computer to boot from your USB? You would install Kubuntu to the USB2/3 just as you would install Kubuntu to a hard drive. Does the computer use UEFI or the older MBR for its firmware? You would then boot the computer to the USB (in either the UEFI mode or the MBR mode), but ... the real issue here is how to boot the computer? I think you'd need to access the computer's firmware setup menus, which is no big deal as long as "they" don't mind; and you need to guess the right key to press to access that firmware (NBD--F2? or F10? or something else--you could google the PC maker to find the "BIOS" access key). Issue: Requiring permission to boot your USB (by accessing the computer's firmware).

[vinnywright]

A good tool to do this ,,,,,,make a live-USB with persistence is "mkusb" it lives in a PPA so https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb

it is real nice ,,,can use GPT ,so you can have a persistence partition larger than 4GIB and sets a NTFS partition for windows accessible storage as well.........(that is whats left of the space after setting the persistence size )


but you say you want your live USB to be secure if someone else gets it ,,,,,,,,I have news for you , unless your data is encrypted if someone gets your live USB or lapptop or hard drive they can get your data .

if you want to go that far (encryption) then look @hear http://docs.kali.org/downloading/kal...sb-persistence

this one gives the way to encrypt the persistence partition making retrieval of the data virtually imposable without the passphrase ,,,,,,so you should not forget it.

VINNY

[vinnywright]

since I was promoting mkusb I thought I would show a running system made with it and how it lays out the partitioning of the USB ,,,,,,,,,

we will do this with 1 screenshot from the live system .

their are 3 Konsoles open + , Firefox , Dolphin , and VLC .

and this is a live-USB of neon-useredition-20161114-0947-amd64.iso with persistence




top left is ,,,,,, "top" showing whats going on.

top center is Dolphin accessing the storage drive on the computer (remember we are in a live session) if you look at Dolphins "Devices" section you will see how the live session sees the drive status .

top right is VLC playing one of the files from the storage drive ,,,,,

bottom left is Konsole showing the "df -h" ,,,,, look to the /cow line showing / to have 12G free ,,,,this is because of the persistence partition.

bottom right is Konsole showing the "parted -l" and the partitioning on the USB

partitions 2&3 are BIOS and UEFI boot files

Partition 4 the .ISO image

Partition 5 the persistence

Partition 1 a NTFS formated partition that can be accessed with a windows box and so easily share files .

this is a clean as in nothing installed to it yet system and this post was made from it .

VINNY

[Fester Bestertester]

Thanks vinnywright, This could do the trick, but given the performance penalty I might wait till the (dim) future when I might be able to afford a decent-sized USB3 stick. Meanwhile I have a system installed on the home's computer. Nobody complains, I doubt they've even noticed, but I might well be shuffled of to another home that probably won't even have a residents'-use computer (I recently found out that this one's donated - sincere thanks to the unnamed donor!). Minimal personal info on that, but still would really prefer to be able to run from a stick.I also have a Raspberry Pi (now a 3) and can run that and take it with me when visit ends. Couldn't get into the wifi there last time, but better info next time might turn the trick.

[Fester Bestertester]

I'm back, and still trying to generate a personalised Kubuntu 2016 stick. Latest attempt using your recommended mkusb sorta works.
However, if there's another usb drive plugged in and active, it immediately gives
error: disk `hd0,4' not found
unaligned pointer 0x10ff178
Aborted. Press any key to exit._
Pressing a key, it gives
error:variable `root' not set
as a brief flash, then goes through to the non-persistent 'Live session user' GUI, with only the one desktop, and Timezone=UTC.
If no other usb device, the expected grub menu comes up, with default *Start Kubuntu - persistent live. Selecting this (or letting it continue) boots to the 2016 GUI (but with
'panel' at top of screen and titled ubiquity-qtsetbg), then the Try/Install Dialog.
Selecting *Start Kubuntu - persistent live to RAM will boot to normal GUI (again as Live session user) with Panel as normal at screen bottom and without the Try/Install Dialog, and here one can set multiple virtual desktops, but this setting is lost at reboot.
I have had it boot as above but by the default selection, and have set multiple virtual desktops, and had this setting persist over a reboot. I can't recall the specific conditions for this, and have been unable to replicate it.
Network, however, RAM or not, is weird. First setup looks normal, but the required key was asked for again. After reboot, the first key seems to have been remembered but the second-key re-ask not so, being asked each time afterwards.

mkusb is still a cut above Startup Disk Creator - that one got shaggified post-2012 and won't install grub to a usb drive... - but seemingly still not fully-fledged. Have there been reports of full persistent setups?

BTW, all posts here (mine and all others') seem to be dated 'today, now'. I'd really rather know when my last posting was actually posted, thank you. Is this something screwy with the Forum as a whole, or with my account settings?

[Snowhog]

BTW, all posts here (mine and all others') seem to be dated 'today, now'. I'd really rather know when my last posting was actually posted, thank you. Is this something screwy with the Forum as a whole, or with my account settings?

I have to say that it's something on your end, as I don't see this behavior here.

[Fester Bestertester]

Thanks Snowhog. Closer scrutiny reveals I've been looking in the wrong place: post headers have the correct data, shooting down my erroneous theory. Sherlock proven right yet again!

[Guest]

Hello, you can copy onto an USB "disk image" called .iso file of a Kubuntu distribution and use it as an independent OS (it's actually the testing mode), classical start, you hit F2, choose start on USB the choose the test mode, then you get your personal private computer but you can't write on it, but you can write in the cloud, so it would solve many problem and allow you to keep what you have done for later!

Otherwise I know it's possible to have a full computer system on a single key, but it would probably only working on a single kind of computer (you probably don't want it to test the hardware every time you start), so you would have to build it on the target machine! How ? Never done it but I guess it would be possible to have an .iso distribution on a USB port and then target an other port with another key and thatr key would turn into a bootable fully adapted / writable USB OS. Must have some precise info on that online, because it's quite cool to have all your computer logistic on a single key ... like if you have to "working" places, the computers stay static and you only carry the key!! On the other hand, smartphones with full keyboard/screen interfaces and the cloud are a serious competition for the traveling USB-OS .. I may try it at some stage!

[GreyGeek]

A distro on a USB stick becomes a "LiveUSB". It will probably use most keyboards, mice, CDROMs and eth0 ports and generally most default video displays. It may or may not connect to a printer and some wifi chips may not work, but most will, as will most 2ndary GPUs. If you use a big enough stick (say 32GB) you can create a storage partition which the LiveUSB can access and use to store apps, data and updates without resorting to a cloud.
I use a Kodashi LiveUSB when I want security.