Mint 20.2 on USB Stick with persistant partition

[Obsolet]

Hi,

I have create a fresh USB drive installation with Linux Mint 20.2 (EDGE) ISO by using RUFUS which allows to create a persistent partition. The stick has 16 GB and I reserved 4 GB for the persistent partition. Stick is USB 3.0 and so is the laptop's USB port. Loading the system works fine and has the same speed as the previously used LIVE system. But when working with the new installation there is a slowness/lack noticeable. Many times the keyboard strokes are not processed in the same moment, apps or Windows such as Terminal do not open, it takes 5-10 seconds until they appear.
First I thought it was an issue with an older USB memory stick but the other one has the same issue. I can see that the stick is constantly accessed. The one stick has a LED for activity and it was flashing the whole time. The current one has no LED for activity but I notice that it gets quite warm.
So I wonder why the Linux installation with persistent partition performs so poorly compared with a LIVE Linux. It is nice to have the persistent system with all settings and apps saved after shutdown but the slowness / lags are concerning.
Any clue/hints?

Thanks!

[JerryF]

I believe that when a live usb without persistence is running, there is very few read/write activity going on. With a usb with persistence, there's much more.

I've had good luck with creating persistent USB flash drives using mkusb. I have a SanDisk Cruzer Glide that's a USB 2 and runs quite well.

mkusb will create the partitions it needs to run the live environment and then it will ask you if you want to use the remaining space for for persistence. The remaining space will depend on the size of the USB drive.

In order to use mkusb, you'll have to add a PPA:

Code: Select all

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa
sudo apt install mkusb

The program will show up in your menu.

[Obsolet]

Thanks for the reply and the tip for the other USB creator, though I believe that RUFUS (on Windows) already creates the partition in the right fashion and I left more than enough space for the "live" system and also for the persistent partition, since the USB 3,0 Verbatim stick has 16GB. I tried GPT (UEFI only) and MBR, FAT32 or NTFS, no matter what, it is painfully slow and the lags are such annoying that you can't work with the system at all.
I am now running LIVE Linux Mint 20.2 EDGE from the same stick but with out the persistent partition and it runs like a charm.
The last try I will make is to use a SSD via USB 3.0 port. I may try the other tool you recommended before with another USB stick as well.

Cheers
Obsolet

[Webtest]

Blessings Obsolet !
I have been running LiveMedia systems exclusively for about 10 years now.

A LiveMedia system is a "squashfs" system. It is in compressed form on the drive, and only decompresses and loads into a memory ramdisk only what is currently needed, and whatever you install after booting. The OS on the LiveMedia can NOT be changed, and it requires just about the same space as the original ISO file ... for LM 20.2 Mate 64-bit that is about 2 GB. I am running LM 18.3 right now and Gparted reports 1.83 GB used on a 1.95 GB boot partition. I always create a substantial "Utility" partition for all the stuff I add to the system ... startup script, printer driver, an update for Firefox browser (which is usually not up to date in the ISO), the Video Codec files (which recently are NOT included in the ISO file). After I get all this prepared, since I use a 4 or 8 GB Kanguru USB drive with a positive LOCK switch, I lock the device and it becomes a ROM, so there is NO way it can get hacked. I use separate thumb drives for my email and other files that need to be written.

I am stuck on LM 18.3 which runs quite robustly for the most part. I recently started using LM 20.2 Mate, but I do NOT like it. Thuderbird Email is especially balky ... it keeps stopping to "catch it's breath". I can't get my printer driver to run on LM 20.2, and there are a bunch of other unfortunate 'quirks'. I have finally managed to build a clean script to load the mint-meta-codecs. It seems that there is no way to eliminate the modal shutdown screen: "Remove installation media and hit ENTER".

I have used unetbootin for years to load ISOs onto LiveMedia drives since it has always removed the modal shutdown problem in the past. Unfortunately, that is another problem in that it won't load in LM 20.2, but I just run it from my LM 18.3 system.

I hope you have better luck with 20.2 than I have had. You might take a look at MX Linux which supposedly has excellent support for LiveMedia system users. Most of my "Webtest" posts are about LiveMedia operation.

Blessings in abundance, all the best,
Art in Carlisle, PA USA

[Jo-con-Ël]

Please give us details about your system posting back inxi -Fxxxz (notice "F" capital letter) from Live session terminal. I know looking for your previous post it is a Elitebook with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and Radeon graphics but it is not enougth.

It is very recent hardware and now you can try LM 20.3 Cinnamon edge edition.

On the other hand, you can see Linux Live session logs in persistent partition Upper>var>log and look for problem on mounting, firmware or graphics when running Live.

[Obsolet]

Hi & thanks as well for sharing your experience.
Actually, the 20.2 version runs for my needs quite fine as a live system, besides the fact, that you have to setup and reinstall everything after shutdown, wihich is understood by the nature of the system. My problem is, that I only have a business laptop which I want to use in my spare time for private needs. Linux on USB seemed then to be a good way to go. After discovering the change of a persistent partition which then lets Linux act like it is installed on an internal storage, by keeping all your apps, files and settings, I was quite happy to get this. Now I am again on the 32 GB USB3.0 (Kingston DataTraveller) which is sometimes quiet on the activity but sometimes it accesses the USB storage constantly and during that no input of the keyboard for instance is possible, although mouse pointer is moving, but still browser windows, new windows or new apps will not launch for minutes. All klicks are taken, because all of a sudden all the apps and windows appear which I tried minutes before Idk what's really making it so slow and laggy.
As mentioned in my previous post, I will try a SSD which could blast the performances on I/O, if that's really the problem with the USB storage, which by my knowledge to not perform very well on IOPS.
I'll see how it goes...

Cheers

[Jo-con-Ël]

With such sizes, maybe not 16GB but from 32GB you'd better make a full install on that USB drives. See here.

[Obsolet]

Thanks for information / link. I will look into it for sure.
Just I made once a full install on an external USB connected SSD and unfortunately the Linux Boot loader was installed on the internal SSD which is a no go!
Read afterwards that this is caused by a bug in the Ubuntu Boot thingy...so I gave up on this option already.

Actually, I was surprised, that a previously installed WIndows OS from a Desktop PC boots just fine when attached via USB to my Laptop. Maybe that's again the better way to go LOL

[JerryF]

...
Just I made once a full install on an external USB connected SSD and unfortunately the Linux Boot loader was installed on the internal SSD which is a no go!
Read afterwards that this is caused by a bug in the Ubuntu Boot thingy...so I gave up on this option already.
...

Did you check that the correct disk/partition was selected for the bootloader location? The reason I ask is that sometimes the installer changes the selection if you make any other changes on that screen.

[Jo-con-Ël]

Just I made once a full install on an external USB connected SSD and unfortunately the Linux Boot loader was installed on the internal SSD which is a no go!
Read afterwards that this is caused by a bug in the Ubuntu Boot thingy...so I gave up on this option already.

That is explained in that link (it is a bug) and pbear also described differents way to solve it (the easiest one is unflag/reflag EFI partition on internal/Windows as indicated in a dedicated chapter/post) disk.

[Obsolet]

Thanks for the additional information and help. At the moment I do not want to risk anything, I had really a tough time as it is a business laptop and any such installations are prohibited and may have consequences

Just another thing I am noticing when running Mint from the USB stick: it has still permanent disk activity. It currently burning, too hot and this may cause damage already. Why is the system so creepy and doing stuff on the storage all the time?

[Petermint]

Verbatim stick

All the verbatim sticks I tested had really bad write speeds to the point where I threw them out. For the continuous small writes of an active OS, you need a stick or card rated at the new A1 or A2 speed.

When there is no persistence, stuff is written to RAM than dropped. Persistence requires a mess of writes that only a real SSD is designed to handle. SD cards and similar introduced clear labelling of A1 and A2 as speeds for lots of small random writes. In the Sandisk range of USB sticks, you need something like the Extreme level.

A fast USB stick or SSD will write fast enough to see the breaks in between the writes.

I found the cheapest option is to recycle SSDs from upgrades using USB enclosures. I have some old mSATA SSDs for that use. I use metal enclosures to let the heat escape. Anything made of plastic just locks in the heat from the flash memory erase/write cycle.

[Revicam]

Hi.

A question of the size of the Caspar (persistance) file.

Looking at some USB boot creators, there is an option to set the size of the persistence size on the USB. What size should it be set to, when using a 32 GB or 64 Gb flash drive?
eg. 50% of available space maybe? More, less?

TIA and keep safe.

Peter

[Jo-con-Ël]

@Revicam

You'd better open a new thread and give details about that tool. There is not limit if persistence is on casper-rw/writable partition, so it will depended on what you want to store/download on it. Limit on case of carper-rw/writable file will depend on filesystem. On FAT 32 partition max file size is 4GB. Other filesystems (exfat, NTFS,..) has not that limit but they are not common filesytems for Linux live drives..

[Revicam]

OK. Thanks Jo-con-El

Just playing around with a few boot creators on a 32 GB USB stick and noticed there are some which have the user option to set the persistence file size and I was wondering what the optimum size, percentage or capacity, would be.

The reason I asked on this thread, was it is not marked as "solved", so I thought it was still active. I'll start a new thread if I come unstuck with this subject.

Thanks again.

Peter

[Jo-con-Ël]

Never mind if it is or not abandoned (I'm almost sure it is) as forum rules said "New Questions Deserve New Topics...." and persistence size is a new question.

In other hand tools offering size for persistence usually are referred to casper-rw files (Rufus, Unetbootin,...) so need to take into account what I said about filesystem. Other tools as Ventoy wont offer that option by default but create main partition on ExFAT, so have not that limint on creating persistence (.img) file.