Re: Making a Debian Bootable USB Pen Drive

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 07:33:23AM -0700, Ottavio Caruso wrote:

Nuno Miguel dos Santos Baeta wrote:


Hi!

I want to install Debian in a USB pen drive.

Don't! Nothing should be installed on a flash drive. A traditional
install was meant for hard drives, not flash drives. Browser cache,
/tmp, syslog and so on will damage the device.


I have only loosely been following this thread, but am curious about
this sort of thing in general. so what if you mount /tmp on tmpfs
(thus putting it in memory or swap dependingon memory loads) and I
wonder, can you change where syslog puts its logs (like into tmp) and
then build some script to save it off when you shutdown? I assume you
are trying to avoid the damage caused by longterm heavy writing which
"wears out" flash memory, right? Likewise, what about putting together

This is certainly one reason. But if you put any *NIX style file
system on there, one which tracks access times, then that will cause
wearout, as well. How many times a day do you access /bin/ls?

a file on whatever harddrive exists (a la knoppix and dsl use of a
swapfile) as a place to mount /var and /tmp while running the system
and again, copy it off to the usb drive during shutdown so that the
info is archived, but the writes to flash are minimized.

It should not be necessary to save anything in /tmp.

Mike
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