How RAM LiveUSB uses?

Support
1

I’m thinking removing the HDD from my Laptop and just boot off a USB Stick instead. However it only has 4GB of Memory. Will this be enough for basically just Firefox?

Since the User would have to an F# key to boot off the Stick, the Laptop would be useless to them. I can just pull the key once the Image and Firefox is loaded.

I brought it Refurbish for $160 including S/H back 2016.

2

Yes, that might work, provided that one doesn’t load too many heavy websites or open too many tabs.

You cannot simply pull the key.

  • You’d have to first of all boot with full copy-to-RAM, which is not what the live session does by default.

  • You’d also have to use one of the minimal images, as the other images are too big to fit into RAM on that machine once they’ve been decompressed.

  • Even with a full copy-to-RAM, you still need to cleanly unmount the live medium before pulling it.

3

Thanks. Which Minimal Images can you Advise me to use? Are there still Distros that are loaded into RAM only?

I didn’t think of unmounting the Live Medium before pulling.

4

Look at List of Linux distributions that run from RAM - Wikipedia

5

These are still around aren’t they? A lot of Times Wikipedia Entries are badly out of date.

But thanks for the Link. That will get me started.

6

There also is a manjaro-USB-stick as persistent system.
Manjaro XFCE 20.0.3 - Persistent USB - released

7

I believe they are. At least, AFAIK Alpine Linux is still alive n’ kickin’.

8

I just read that the other day. Thanks for the reminder.

9

How much Space does Manjaro take up once installed? My Father just brought me a three pack of Sandisk 16GB Flask Sticks last night. Will 16GB be enough for Manjaro with /home and /swap?

10

That depends on what version of Manjaro and how much additional software you install on top of that.

I have a fairly well-packed installation with KDE Plasma, and my total amount of used disk space ─ including /home ─ is (very roughly) about 14 GiB. But then again, I’m using btrfs with zstd compression, so if it were ext4, then it would probably be a lot bigger.

You definitely don’t want a swap partition or swap file on a USB stick.

  • USB sticks don’t support TRIM, so putting swap on a USB stick will wear out the stick too quickly.

  • Unless the connection is USB 3.0 ─ meaning that both the port and the stick must support that ─ it would either way be too slow.

11

I can second that. btrfs with ztd saves at my installation about 35% and it seems faster to. (because the most is reading in normal operation)