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I've been searching around trying to find a good Ubuntu Live option that I can put on a 2Gb USB stick. This has turned out to be surprisingly harder than I imagined. Most of the options are around Ubuntu install media on USB. For example this post here (which is great for its purpose). There is information on live cd customization as well for the enterprising. Before posting this, I tried a few images from the post above to see if those can be used as live (despite focused on installation) and unfortunately not. So, maybe someone can help me here. What I am looking for:

  • [requirement] A minimal live Ubuntu USB under 2Gb
  • [requirement] Able to install packages using apt
  • [preference] Some persistence would be nice
  • [don't care] CLI only is ok, GUI is fine too. Don't really care

What are my options, if any. My main use-case is to have a lightweight USB I can quickly boot into for rescue or backup operations when for whatever reason I cannot do it on the main installed system. I am not tied to ubutu, but ubuntu would be preferred.

ste_kwr
  • 11,540

2 Answers2

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While now I use SSD with full install, I used to make my own multiple boot with grub loopmount of multiple ISO. I would put all these and others on a flash drive as repair drive. With UEFI boot, grub needs to be in ESP - efi system partition, FAT32 with boot,esp flags. But ISO can be in any other partition. FAT32 has a max of 4GB for each file, so larger distribution ISOs cannot be in FAT32.

-rw-rw-rw- 1 fred fred 2.5G Jan 14 11:13 'boot-repair-disk-64bit (1).iso'
-rw-rw-rw- 1 fred fred 914M Oct  2 10:00  systemrescue-11.02-amd64.iso
-rw-rw-rw- 1 fred fred 880M May  5  2023  boot-repair-disk-64bit.iso
-rw-rw-rw- 1 fred fred 713M Feb 12  2024  rescatux-0.74.iso
-rw-rw-r-- 1 fred fred 550M Jan 18 11:16  gparted-live-1.6.0-10-amd64.iso

I create my own flash drive, by installing grub, creating boot stanza of all the ISOs on drive. Easy then to update with new ISO when released. But now vmany find ventoy easier.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_grub2boot.html

How to create a bootable USB with multiple ISO images in it

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multiboot_USB_drive#GParted_Live

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

oldfred
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there is a tutorial here explaining how to create a Ubuntu live USB stick with persistent storage: https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-persistent-live-usb/

the catch is that you may need to use an older version of Ubuntu to fit within your 2gb size limit. is there any technical reason for not using an 8gb or 16gb USB stick?