I had this 64Gb USB stick lying around. A bargain once that I couldn't resist, but didn't really need. Out of curiosity I installed Antix 15 on it, not as a live system, but using it a 24Gb partition on it as a hard disk. I didn't really think it would work, in view of my experience with Windows. But it did, in a wonderful way.

I have since tested it on 11 different hardwares, ranging from10y-old to brand new laptops (Acer, HP, Asus, Lenovo) and some desktops too. All of them booted from it, with one single exception: an old Fujitsu laptop (that had been having issues with Windows too) seemingly booted fine, but didn't listen to keyboard or mouse after showing the logon screen. I didn't bother experimenting with boot codes or so, but decided to discard that one. To be honest: on one ASUS laptop with SiS graphics, I couldn't get the native 1200x800 resolution working, no matter what I tried. Selecting the SiS-bootcode was of no avail. Everything else seemed to work perfectly.

If like me you work on different computers, and you would like to take your working environment with you, you could give it a try. It's great fun to see a computer boot faster from USB than Windows does from its hardddisk.

Some things to consider though: harddisks are by default not mounted, and getting write-access to them is a bit troublesome. Reading and writing large files from/to USB is also rather slow. Also, on each new hardware you often have to reconfigure the network interfaces. But that is a one-time job.

interesting.. I tried something similar some years ago but found that drive designations changed on different machines. since that time, moving to UUID for partition information has alleviated that somewhat.

However, if you use the live system, we now have a method of saving the different network configurations of each particular machine, automatically. and you get the"mount all" cheatcode in the boot menu. not to mention the safe video option that will load vesa with an xorg.conf. An installed system, if you use vesa in an xorg.conf, will always use vesa instead of the appropriate hardware driver.

Here too, network configuration is remembered. You end up with maybe 10 interfaces, but Antix sorts out which one to use automatically. Now I just need to find that"mount all" equivalent. __{{emoticon}}__

Just wondering how this qualifies as a how to?

I see no instructions what so ever like in this.

Post your tips and tricks here.

build-your-own-t4438.html

This seems more of a jaw jacking session than a how to to me?
How about some detailed insruction steps with screenshots dirkd?

rocking-urxvt-with-style-t5048.html

Just mentioning this because I have stood in your shoes before long ago.

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Well, I wondered under which heading I would post it. Feel free to move it to a better suited place. I didn't think it worthwhile to post screenshots and the like: there's nothing special or difficult to it, just a straightforward installation choosing the USB as target hard disk. The only thing needed is some spare time, and confidence that it will work.

Feel free to move it to a better suited place

Alrighty then. New users it is .

dirkd wrote: harddisks are by default not mounted, and getting write-access to them is a bit troublesome

dirkd wrote:Now I just need to find that"mount all" equivalent. __{{emoticon}}__

Have you tried"F4-Options" -->"mount=all" in the bootloader?

I just did, and it didn't work. No idea what I do wrong, or maybe there's something there that I don't understand.

I boot from the USB. When on the boot options screen I press <F4> and choose 'mount all' from the pop-up list. I can then see the chosen option listed at the bottom of the screen. However, there is no boot code added to the grub command line. So I just press <Enter> to boot Antix Snapshot. After logon, I start SpaceFM (default desktop is Space-IceWM). No internal harddisk is shown. I can choose to show internal devices, and then /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 is shown, but when trying to mount it I get an error message:

Udevil error 88: bla bla, and something about not being root. Of course, as root I can always mount /dev/sda1, but it is not writable for an ordinary user. And I don't need the <F4>-option for that.

By the way, I since learned from Dolphin_Oracle's video
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how to edit udevil.conf, and that works fine to get access to one's harddisks.

Thanks dirkd for that link to D_O's video. I appreciate instruction on desktop functionality. And thanks D_O, I like the multiple approach coverage very much.