Can linux be plug and go?

[Eric Kazer]

I have Linux Mint Cinnamon installed on a USB 3.0 SSD. I am wondering if it can be used on other computers without reinstalling it to the drive, or would things like drivers be a problem?

 

Reason Retropie plug and go x86 version for portability on a laptop or desktop.

[Theguywhobea]

Yes, you can make your install on your flash drive be persistent, however I've never seemed to get it to work correctly, so if anyone else here has a good guide on doing it I'd love to hear as well.

[De-Wohli]

Shouldn't be too big of a problem though why not use a live version Handy persistent bootable usb guide

[Eric Kazer]

I have it booting off of a cheap Monster SSD. I should try it on my laptop. It is slow on the machine I installed on to the SSD with because it's USB 2.0 on old hardware. My concern is PC swapping because it is using a Nvidia GPU. I have heard of trouble with Nvidia and Intel graphics support. Though the Nvidia 390.-- driver is working fine on that desktop. Proprietary driver needed with Nvidia card. My case GTX1050ti. Mine is installed as a full bootable device like C:. 

 

I installed to the SSD from a thumb drive with the Mint Image installer. Than I installed Retropie on to the USB 128GB SSD with ROMs. I will see how well it runs on my Intel based laptop, 3630QM with onboard graphics. Don't know if it will work, being that it was installed using a AMD Phenom 955 and GTX 1050 ti. I want to do this without touching Windows 10 OS on Laptop.

[Eric Kazer]

The USB SSD is acting as a primary boot device with programs, not a installer disk.

[wasab]

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

 

use the guide above. It is a nice gui wizard for creating a persistent usb drive.

 

The installer is just an app no different than any others. You can just sudo unistall that thing if it offends you. If you truly wish to "install" the OS onto you usb you can get a virtual machine, boot it into linux. connect usb to it and instruct the installer to install to the usb. I wouldnt recommend it tho, usd isnt build to host an operating system. Your system will be thoughly bottleneck and will be quite slow. 

[Chunchunmaru_]

Yes, it should, but keep in mind some distributions tend to compile their initramfs with the loaded modules/drivers your OS have, while the live installer image has huge support for a variety of systems, so if your plan is to use an installed linux distro instead of a persistent storage one, it could work on a variety of systems similar to yours

[Eric Kazer]

I plugged it into the laptop and it booted. Retropie is a bit buggy shutting down. It does not always get back to the desktop of Mint cinnamon 19.01. It did need a lot of updates.

 

The 2 systems are completely different. The laptop is AMD Phenom 955 with GTX 1050ti, and the laptop is I7-3630QM with Intel graphics. It boots on laptop, I will need to see if the desktop boots. Both have 8 GB memory. It is funny that it works at all. I am wondering if it can switch the drivers for each PC. It is slow because of the USB configs. The laptop does boot faster because of USB 3.0. This does make mint portable.

 

I did have to mess around in the Laptop's BIOS to make it as a dual boot system when the USB SSD is plugged in. I wanted it to also be able to boot Windows 10 normally unless I tell it to boot to the USB SSD by pressing escape and selecting the SSD to boot from. I had to disable secure boot and something else that I can't remember. There is a video on Youtube on how to configure the Asus K55A that I have. It does work. Makes for one powerful Retropie once configured. Mint OS isn't too bad ether.