[sf-lug] USB 3.0 Flash Drives - Penguin shaped and others

[aaronco36]

Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> What I was commenting on was your focussing primarily and
> increasingly on live distros booted from flash drives, in
> your offerings to SF-LUG. What I was saying is that this mode
> of deployment portrays Linux badly because of dreadfully bad
> mass-storage performance, and that the running system cannot
> be reasonably maintained and expanded, hence the user doesn't
> really experience a representative system, just a limited but
> working model of one.  That has very slow disc reads.  ;->
>
> It's the difference between tourism and living somewhere.  And,
> what I was saying is that an installed system running in a VM
> is, unlike a live distro booted from a flash drive, a real and
> realistic Linux system, that a user can try out and see how
> things go without having to devote an entire computer to it.


Probably obvious to most, but my own takeaway lessons from this discussion 
are that there are three defensible use-case modes of deployment for USB 
sticks:

1. Portable mass-storage only (without the ability to live boot).

2. Live distro booting _without_ mass-storage capability for the dedicated 
purposes of a) running various utilities and "touristy" tasks (e.g., 
troubleshooting, evaluating Linux driver support for hardware, viewing a 
distro's novel or revamped D.E./packages, taking an unfamiliar OS out for 
a demo, ...etc.) and b) eventual installation to hard drive.

3. Live distro booting _with_ persistent storage onto either the selfsame 
USB stick (portable convenience of data but slow disc reads) or onto the 
hard drive(s) of the host system (much faster disc reads for data but 
decidedly non-portable.)

Again, these are probably obvious to most if not all folks reading this 
:-|

To ramble on a bit more...

A helpful use-case scenario for me for using a live distro booting with 
persistent storage as per #3 above is to install Knoppix onto a 64GB USB 
stick -- as the prices for this capacity seem to be falling over time -- 
and then save each individual guest Virtual Machine disc images from a 
full host install of a Virtual Machine Manager (e.g., the virtualbox VMM) 
up to ~54 GB as persistent storage on that selfsame 64GB USB stick.  This 
way, one could have the advantage of using Knoppix's portable live boot 
utilities and features when needed as well as having the ability to save 
and transfer guest VM disc images between different hosting systems, 
making the assumption on my end that a) the hosting systems themselves 
could be disc-space limited for containing too many _multiple_ VM disc 
images and that b) the VM disc images can/should optimimally be copied via 
the USB stick onto the hard drives of host systems for reasons of 
performance but for _limited-time-use_ on each host system (because of 
possible disc-space limitations on a particular hosts system.)  One could 
even make certain in this scenario that the _maximum_ size of each virtual 
machine disc image can only be something like 40 GB, in order to use the 
remaining 10 GB+ of persistent USB-stick storage for portability of non-VM 
disc image data as required.

One could also carry out the similar scenario using 32 GB USB sticks with 
Knoppix installed for using the remaining ~25 GB of persistent storage. 
The drawbacks of this are a) VM disc images are limited to that maximum 
size of 25 GB and b) very minimal extra disc space can subsequently get 
allotted for any extra non-VM disc image data.

-A

aaronco36 at sdf.org