Minisforum Z83-F Mint install on external SD

[crivalen]

Hi all, I'm trying the re-use a miniPC Minisforum Z83-F with soldered onboard eMMC dead
This PC was dedicated mainly to internet browsing, audio and video playing (using acestream) and torrent downloading on external HDD
To avoid to throw it away, I'm using a live Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon from a 8Gb USB key. I got correct video, audio drivers, and everything works smoothly.
The issue is that, every time this miniPC reboot, I have to start over with all the little things I'm trying to install: VPN connection, the few app downloaded and all the local settings are gone every time.
This miniPC got a SD card slot where a 64Gb SD is placed, is there a way to have on this SD a bootable live session of Mint but modified to have the few things listed above already embedded?
Thanks in advance for any feedback you could provide

[Catsbark]

Hi, crivalen.

I'm no expert, but here are my thoughts:

• Many systems will not see an SD card as a bootable device. If yours will, you might be able to bring this off.
  SD cards are commonly not suitable for high speed access. There are high-performance versions that would work, but you need to be sure you get that type.

With those ideas in mind, why not try?

[Koentje]

You can try to format the SD at EXT4 and label it casper-rw and make a live usb stick with persistens. mkusb is a good tool for this. If all goes well then the live stick sees the SD and stores all settings and changes on it.

[djph]

This miniPC got a SD card slot where a 64Gb SD is placed, is there a way to have on this SD a bootable live session of Mint but modified to have the few things listed above already embedded?

Not really. "persistent" live sessions are ... fragile.

Your best bet would be installing directly to the SD Card -- though as mentioned, it'll likely feel pretty slow. depending on the eMMC footprint, it might be something one could remove (although if it's one of the fancy BGA pinouts ... probably not so much)

[Koentje]

Not really. "persistent" live sessions are ... fragile.

Nothing wrong with persistent! I have a debian NAS server without desktop. In grub i made an option to boot from an ISO that i store in /boot/images with persistent. I made a small 4Gb partition called casper-rw to store all the changes i make.
When my main system crashed because of a faulty PS i worked this way for 2 weeks, without any problem. I fully customized the desktop, installed some programs i needed, and i dare to say if you don't go crazy it is very reliable!

I'll bet this way it is faster than running it from the sdcard!

[djph]

"it worked for 2 weeks" does not disprove that it is indeed fragile.

It's even less of a statement of stability if you kept that machine up for multiple days at a time ...

[crivalen]

Thank you all of you for all the suggestions. I really appreciated it.
After reading your valid hints about how poor in terms of speed an SD could be, I tried the following:
The BIOS of this miniPC foreseen the boot from USB HDD so I'm using an external 240Gb SSD (in an enclosure USB3.0) where I installed Mint to have a real O/S installed and all the changes, app and setting kept instead of a live session
I just finished the installation and seems to work and the speed is, for the little time I did "play" with it, pretty OK (I was used to have Windows 10 very slow on this Intel Atom miniPC)

Thanks again

[Koentje]

"it worked for 2 weeks" does not disprove that it is indeed fragile.

It's even less of a statement of stability if you kept that machine up for multiple days at a time ...

Or maybe the system you tested it on was pretty fragile?