Ventoy + as many ISOs as you want
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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- for Ventoy! more dynamic Linux experiences is one place and functions for one time effort..
Interesting! But will changes made to the OS you're using be persistent? If I'm reading this right, then probably not, right?
correct – you can save individual files to the USB stick but anything like UI customization will be lost
You can you will have to set somethings up for it.
That's interesting, I'd be interested in finding out more about that. Let's see, I've always wanted to try this:
@ChatGPT@lemmings.world, how do you set up Ventoy for persistent installs of distros? That is, to be able to make changes to the operating system and have them stick?
Hi toothpaste_sandwich@feddit.nl,
Creating persistent live USBs with Ventoy is possible. However, keep in mind that not all Linux distributions support this feature. The distributions that Ventoy currently supports for persistent installations are Ubuntu and some of its derivatives.
Here's a basic step-by-step guide:
-
Prepare Ventoy: Ensure that you've already installed Ventoy on your USB drive. If not, download the latest Ventoy release from its official website and install it to your USB drive.
-
Prepare the ISO file: Download the ISO file of the Linux distribution and copy it to the Ventoy USB drive. You can just put it in the root directory.
-
Create a persistence file: Ventoy uses a data file to enable the persistence feature. You need to create this file on the Ventoy USB drive, there is an official utility named
create_vtoy_img.shin Linux orVentoy2Disk.exeon Windows that you can use to create this persistence data file. Name the file and define its size according to how much persistent storage you need. -
Bootstrap the persistence feature: After creating the data file, you should create a JSON file in the Ventoy USB drive to bootstrap the persistence feature. You can create a
.jsonfile in the root directory of the Ventoy USB drive with the following format:
{
"persistence" : [
{
"image" : "/your-linux-distro.iso",
"backend" : "/ventoy-persistent-data-file.dat"
}
]
}
Replace your-linux-distro.iso with the filename of your Linux distro ISO file and replace ventoy-persistent-data-file.dat with your Ventoy persistent data file's name.
- Boot from the Ventoy USB drive: Finally, boot your computer from the Ventoy USB drive. The Linux distro will launch with the persistence feature, so you'll be able to save any changes you make.
Remember this is a generalized guide and actual steps can vary based on the specific distro, and tools being used.
Hope this helps! If you encounter issues or have further questions, feel free to ask.
Huh, well, that doesn't seem very convenient at all. I'm not all that interested in Ubuntu-based distros, for one.
Still, the ChatGPT bot seems to work well, so that's pretty cool.
Arch and fedora are supported as well.
There are ways, but it's not standard.
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Do yourself a favor and get an external hard drive. You'll get much better results and can run almost any distro with it.
Definitely this.
I gave up on thumb drives as they are kind of trash. External NVMe drives are affordable, and the speed difference is BIG.
Even better get a NVMe enclosure and an internal NVMe drive.
Enclosures are $20 and you can get a 500gb Samsung 970 Evo for $35.
Smaller, lighter, cheaper and faster than any off the shelf portable drive you could get. I have one and it fully saturates the USB C 10Gbit port on my motherboard.
Not really. If you only need to use a browser and some text editors you don't need anything better.
somehow no one said puppy linux. it's small, fast and functional. there is an compatible debian version here - https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/
I use puppy Linux all the time. Works great, on a fairly crappy USB stick. It saves files to the stick and saves user preferences and everything. Very recommended from my end.
One piece of advice I want to throw in here: Use a proper file system! exFAT or F2FS are flash-aware and will ensure that you dom't kill your drive by frequent writes to the same memory cells!
Do you want it to be persistent(all your stuff is saved) or you dont mind it starting fresh everytime you plug in to devices?
You could try Tails, it's specifically made for this purpose. It's ui is a bit old looking though, and it's not that user friendly. If you can stand xfce or kde though, you'll feel right at home though.
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It’s more about your software requirements then anything else.
Stable distros can be a pain when run as a desktop, so that might need to be rethought.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a rolling distro which deserves a look.
Endeavor OS for something Arch based.
Debian Testing is rolling for something Debian.
Fedora is semi-rolling for something in the red hat ecosystem.
OpenSuse Leap is a stable distro which gets bumped once a year, so that might be an option.
Bunsenlabs is Debian-based, but doesn't have a classic desktop environment. Instead it uses super lightweight Openbox window manager and some other tricks to emulate one. It will run very well with 20gb disk space (you have triple that at your disposal). If you remove the programs you don't use (the office suite, etc etc) you can trim the install down even more.
Wow Bunsenlabs. Now that’s a distro I haven’t heard in a while. lol. I used to have it on an old laptop many many years ago.
I loved Crunchbang was sad to see it go
I've tried so many others out and I keep going back to it! I put it on everything haha.
Very helpful, thank you. I will definitely give this a try!
No worries. It's been my daily driver for a very long time at this point across many different machines. If you do go with Bunsen, it's still on Debian 11. You can safely do an apt dist-upgrade to 12 and it will keep the Bunsenlabs flavor without issue. I often run Sid repo as well, no issues for me.
Solid consumer advice
Maybe MX linux or AntiX Linux. They are very thumb drive focused
I had Manjaro Linux on my 128GB pendrive and it worked completely fine. I guess you can install any distro because thumb drives are only (mobile) disks after all. Just remember that your USB lifespan will shorter because there's a lot of saving/reading in process
I've always used Xubuntu. It's reasonably lightweight and the Ubuntu USB creator does the heavy lifting for creating persistence. The only downside is you have to have a running instance an Ubuntu flavor (bare metal, VM or USB) to use the tool.
I'll probably just flash to one drive and install to the other. Thanks for the tip though!
Check out the Immutable Versions of Fedora (Kinonite and Silverblue especially)
Almost any Linux distribution would fit that purpose
If you're using the flash drive as a block storage device with a root partition, I think just about any distribution would fit your requirements. Just try experimenting with it and make sure that both your machines can boot into the flash drive.
Ok, thanks. I just wasn't sure if there were compatibility or stability issues with certain distros from switching machines so much.
The only trade off here is that read/write operations are going to be throttled by the speed of your flash drive which will be very noticeable compared to NVME internal storage.
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