How can I install LM17Cinnamon to 8GB USB Flash

[mikecolley]

Hi All:

Thank You Clem and ALL for LM17 Cinnamon and this board.

The installer requires 8.1GB free. I don't know how to install LM17Cinnamon to an 8GB flash because lack of free space.

Certainly this has been discussed before. Can someone point me to a thread. I WANT to install LM17Cinnamon to an 8GB flash drive, but the install procedure requires me to have 8.1GB free.

I suppose I could install to a 16GB flash drive then gparted the partition to be smaller after install, but that is not as good as a clean install. I'm looking for an 8GB clean install.

After install I intend to remove Libre Office and use the flash drive in a dedicated unmonitored environment, so there will be plenty of space.

Right now I'm using live session with persistence on 8GB USB Flash. Two problems: 1) The first problem is sometimes (intermittent fail) the live boot process freezes at SYSLINUX and then next boot time it magically boots, and this intermittent failure is just not good enough. I haven't found a solution to the SYSLINUX intermittent at boot failure. If someone knows of a fix for this it would help. I will start a separate topic for this Q. 2) Another reason to switch to an installed system is I get EXT4 that way (better) (live system requires FAT) and EXT4 backs up correctly using clonezilla that way. The live system doesn't restore properly in clonezilla.

Thank You All

note: I may go quiet to travel to a new contract but i will check back.

[nerdtron]

You need two flash drives. One is the installer for Mint and another the USB drive that you will install Mint to.
Mint installer will fit on a 2Gb flash Drive. I recommend 16Gb drive for the Mint USB drive.

1. Create a Live system for Mint using the smaller USB drive.
2. Remove/disconnect all internal hard drives on the computer. So as to avoid any "accidentally wiped everything on my hard drive" problems.
3. Plug both USB and boot into the live Mint installer.
4. Run the installer. It should detect your 16Gb drive and proceed with the install as normal.
5. Upon reboot, choose to boot on the16Gb drive and it should be a complete Mint install.

[karlchen]

Hi, nerdtron.

Your instruction is absolutely correct.
Yet, it does not answer the question "How can I install LM17Cinnamon to 8GB USB Flash?".
Mikecolley insists on installing Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon on an 6 GB USB pendrive, although the installer insists that the minimum available disk space has got to be 8.1 GB.
The actual difference between the available disk space on the pendrive and the required available disk space will be larger than merely 0.1 GB, because pendrive makers calculate 8 GB as 1000 x 1000 x 1000 x 8. Result: 8,000,000,000. The installer, however, calculates 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 x 8.1 = 8,697,308,774.
This means the net capacity in GB of the pendrive is actually merely 7.45 GB.

Without having tried myself, I tend to assume that the installer cannot be persuaded to install on a 7.45 GB partition ignoring the minimum required size. If this is correct then this will take us back to your instruction, nerdtron: use a 16 GB pendrive instead.

Kind regards,
Karl

[mikecolley]

Hi nerdtron:

You are absolutely correct and that is what I do. However I want to install on to a 8GB USB flash drive and the LM17 Cinnamon mint installer requires 8.1GB of space and the installer refuses to install on my 8GB USB flash drive because it is just 0.1GB too small.

Hi karlchen:

You are absolutely correct, Thank You sir. So, I'm still looking for an answer.

Thanks All!

[douglas.hammond]

Boot to the LiveCD/LiveUSB, and once at the desktop, hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal, and run:

Code: Select all

sudo gedit /usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/misc.py

Find this line

Code: Select all

    min_disk_size = size * 2 # fudge factor.

([Ctrl]+[F] "fudge" worked for me.)

Change that it so that it reads

Code: Select all

    min_disk_size = size * 1.1 # fudge factor.

SAVE the file.

Now run the installer from the desktop. You should be able to install to your 8GB drive now.

[Incentive I.C]

Yes just get 2 usb. One for root and one for / home.

[brainout]

For crying out loud, you can install Mint directly to any size external drive or stick and have full persistence up to the extent of the drive or stick. You do not need stupid LiveUSB Creator or stupid Unetbootin and their outdated limitations (requiring your truly brilliant coding of 'fudge factor', wow what a great post that was). Some genius at Mint and at Fedora, and PCLinuxOS, or maybe Mr. Torvalds himself, created the installer program so YOU DO NOT NEED TO INSTALL TO AN INTERNAL HARD DRIVE.

Look, just do the 10 steps here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... &t=197956

Try those steps, see for yourself. Seriously, there's no need for that funky casper stuff and those 4-GB-persistence-limited instructions which don't actually work well, stick will be unstable. Ubuntu's instructions are flat wrong, and they won't fix it. Two years of giving wrong information by all the big houses, please it needs to stop.

I would suggest 'Install Mint' (big desktop icon as soon as the DVD loads) to a 60GB or 250 GB Go flex or other external drive if you use Mint a lot, else 64 GB Kingston stick or 32 GB Patriot stick. I did all of those, starting two years ago with Mint 13. Am running Mint Mate 17 on 60GB external pocket drive, and should probably clone it to a 128 GB Kingston Data Traveller stick cuz the latter's on sale at Amazon right now. Then you can stick it in any Windows machine you like (i.e., XP) and turn on the machine, bada bing bada boom you got LINUX without vm or dual-boot, full access to all your Windows files, yet without any boot hassles. Yay.

Clone with Knoppix or Clonezilla.

Linus is now free to travel without limitation!

It's Windows' best friend, too! XP can't write to DVD, but Linux can. Stick it in any of my XP machines, and I can copy folders without that dumb Windows crash that occurs every time it does mass copying because it won't copy that one file, or a thousand other things that make me tear my hair out with Windows.