Hi,
I am new to this forum, and hope this is the right place to post this topic.
I am also pretty new to mint and linux at all and used a live usb stick of mint 14 cinnamon to get a quick overview. I soon noticed, I love it

, so I tried to make a persistent usb to try some more things (customizing etc.), but ran into some troubles. I used Universal Usb Installer for making it persistent. Although in the syslinux.cfg in the menu entry "persistent" is added, it didn't save my changes to the system. I read a lot of tutorials how to make a persistent usb, but none of them worked for me. Only after adding a new user and "persistent" after the quite splash in the boot.cfg, it did. So I wonder what's all about this syslinux.cfg file, because I never get into that screen, where the menu entries (e.g. "Persistent Mode") of the syslinux.cfg are listed. I only see the normal grub, when I boot from usb. I guess I haven't really understand the meaning of grub, isolinux, syslinux in terms of live persistent,... Maybe I also should say, that I run the usb on an UEFI Win8 system and it's an SanDisk Cruzer USB.
So what is the proper way to make persistent usb? How does the boot.cfg-syslinux.cfg work? Because I thought, that's exactly what the Universal USB Installer should do, instead of extra adding the persistent to the grub.cfg.
I would also be intrested in how to enable a not-gui-login window (shell login?). And how to change the hostname/computername, because I tried changing both /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts file, but after reboot it's mint again. Is that because it's the live version?
I hope it's the right corner of the forum for this, at least for the first/main question. It could also be right for the newbie section

If so, I'm very sorry for that and for my bad english!
Thank you in advance for helpful answers/tipps!