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History
Proposed by IBM in 2004, in the papers "Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads" (PDF & Summary) and Boot Linux from a FireWire device.
Benefits and limitations
- In contrast to live CDs, the data contained on the booting device can be changed and additional data stored on the same device. This allows for live USBs to be used as personal storage, as it allows a user to carry their preferred operating system, applications, and configuration as well as personal files with them, making it easy to share a single system between multiple users.
- Live USBs provide the additional benefit of enhanced privacy, because the user can easily carry the USB device with them or store it in a secure location (e.g. a safe), reducing the opportunities for others to access their data. On the other hand, usually it is easy for a USB device to become lost or stolen, so data encryption and backup is even more important than with a typical desktop system.
- The absence of moving parts in USB flash devices allows for faster seek time than is possible with hard drives or optical media, meaning small programs will start faster from a USB flash drive than from a local hard disk or live CD. However, as USB devices typically achieve lower data transfer rates than internal hard drives, booting from a computer lacking USB 2.0 support can be very slow.
- Some computers, particularly older ones, may not have a BIOS that supports USB booting. Many which do support USB booting may still be unable to boot the device in question. In these cases a computer can often be "redirected" to boot from a USB device through use of an initial bootable CD or floppy disk.
- Due to the additional write cycles that occur on a full-blown installation, the life of the flash drive may be slightly reduced. This doesn't apply to systems particularly designed for live systems which keep all changes in RAM until the user logs off.
Principle of installation
Various applications exist to create live USBs; examples include the Fedora Live USB Creator and UNetbootin, which works with a variety of distributions. A few Linux distribution and live CDs have ready-made scripts which perform the steps below automatically. In addition on some, extra applications can be installed, and a persistent file system can be used to store changes.
To install a live USB system on a memory stick the following steps need to be done:
