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I remember that some years ago there wan an app that enabled you to make persistent USB drive. There was a slider and you were able to set the amount of persistent space on the USB drive.

Now it seems it is not working anymore. I tried mkusb, but it is not working. I am trying to install Ubuntu 20.04.1 persistent image on live USB.

Matej Kovačič
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3 Answers3

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You need a program to create bootable USB drives.

If you have Windows, you can use Rufus.

You can download it from: https://rufus.ie/en/

Its advantage is that you won't need to download the ISO of a distro, since it allows you to download it automatically in the process of creating the bootable USB.

Once downloaded, connect the USB to the computer and run Rufus.

In Boot Choice, leave the Disk or ISO image option set, and click on the Select button.

A screen will open where you will have to choose the Ubuntu ISO.

Once you have added it, you only have to add memory space to the persistent partition, which is what allows everything you do on the USB with Linux to be saved, changes to the operating system and files, so that every time you start it it is not from scratch.

Once you have done this, you do not need to touch anything else.

If you only use Linux as your operating system, then you should use Balena Etcher. You can download it here: https://etcher.balena.io/

kyodake
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One cannot modify a "Live" USB of any type.

The "Live" OS is uncompressed from the USB device and booted into RAM. There's no provision for copying changes ("installed Wireguard") back into the compressed image on the USB device.

You may have heard of "Live USB with Persistence". This is simply a "Live USB" (see above) with an additional, writeable, partition on the USB device.

You could use apt-get download ... to save the packages you install to the writable partition, for easy reinstalls later. See /var/log/apt/* to get a list of packages (and dependencies) to download, and you can do a "network-free" package installation.

waltinator
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Well, my proposal is to just install Ubuntu onto a USB stick. No need for a "live" USB stick at all, except for installing on the "persistent" stick you will use after the install.

I've been running my Linux distributions from USB drives since external USB SSDs exist. But your system really doesn't care if you install onto SSD, USB stick or internal hard disk.

Hope this clarifies what I already tried to explain in my first comment.

mark
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