D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Linux Training

 

> Carry a demo USB key (I use Knoppix) it is good practice.

Another thumbs up here for always having a USB stick or 5 floating
around in my bag/pocket/car for when I need them - which is very
frequently. You can do "Windows-to-go" on USB now as well by the way but
it's very inelegant and nowhere near as flexible and portable as Linux
for this.

Another handy feature that some of you might not know is that most Linux
distros support being installed to a USB stick with both encryption and
"persistence" enabled, which is really, really useful - rather than
booting a vanilla live environment every time a portion of the USB drive
is retained as an encrypted and permanent storage facility that is
mounted as an overlay when used. This way your portable Linux distro can
be upgraded and customised, you can cart files about securely, etc. It
really is just like having a completely independent OS + home
environment on a stick that you can just boot on any computer you use.
It's rare in my job for me to not use one of these on most days, it's
*that* useful. And of course you can boot and use any
employer/client/friend/whatever computer you need to on the run without
worrying about messing up the system in place on disk - in fact I use
them most to fix the broken Windows systems on disk in the first place.

Kali Linux has a bit of a reputation but is actually a highly usable
Linux OS based on Debian and has probably the best pre-installed
collection of software going - especially if you need to get work done.
They also kind of lead the way in making setting up a live
persistent+encrypted USB environment for probably obvious reasons and
the default installation medium has a direct boot option specifically
for setting this up so it's really easy to test.

Another handy trick I've picked up on my travels is that it's entirely
possible to have a single bootable USB stick with a special chainloader
that you can dump as many bootable images on as you can fit. I can't
even begin to tell you how useful this. I used to have hundreds of the
damn things, one per OS basically. Now I have two 64Gb USB3 Sandisks
with neat folders full of raw ISOs, DMGs, IMGs and so on for different
system images so I can boot one of those, choose from the menu of
available OS images on the drive and chainload into it. There are lots
of different ways of setting up these 'multiboot' type USB devices but
by far the easiest - and it's cross platform too - is E2B.

Cheers



Some links and references:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/planning/windows-to-go-overview

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/14912/create-a-persistent-bootable-ubuntu-usb-flash-drive/

https://docs.kali.org/downloading/kali-linux-live-usb-persistence

http://www.easy2boot.com/
-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq