Kolibri USB

[Bl00dwing]

Hi, this is my first entry in this forum so pardon any mistakes i may make :I

 

I am trying to make a thumb drive whith some kind of very basic OS on it wich i then can boot on virtually any computer.

i found Kolibri and it looks quite promising. But i am too noob to even "install" it.

i did not find any understandable instructions i could follow.

 

does anyone know how to make kolibri work OR does anyone know anything with the same functionality?

 

many thanks in advance.   

[RedWulf]

Depends on what you want, if I read it right then you can just make a live 32bit OS from most any linux.

Download lili and mint 32bit then you can boot from said thumb drive on most any pc that supports booting from usb. 

Damn small linux and puppy are lighter but not as user friendly. Kolibri seems like abit of a far shot since the community won't be as large nor is the support and honestly you'll never run into such low specs and still need a gui.

But if you really want to they offer instructions . The easiest way is to download the free tool rufus(great to have for any os install) and then select the downloaded live cd file(kolibri) and the usb drive. Then plug in, restart, hit f2/f8/f12 and select to boot from usb. 

[ForsakenLive]

1) Download the latest distro here http://builds.kolibrios.org/eng/ (it's the one named latest-distr.7z, don't download the ISO one).

2) Insert your empty USB flash drive in your windows computer and run inst.exe from HD_Load\USB_Boot folder in the distribution package.

3) Copy kolibri.img to the root folder of your USB flash drive.

 

Now you have a booteable USB drive with Kolibri OS installed on it.

[Bl00dwing]

Thanks! I managed to make it work thanks to you 2  

and i soon realized this is not really what i imagined.

 

anyway TY

[Bl00dwing]

I want to use this post to also ask for other OS that can boot from an usb that are a little bit more polished. is there anything worth trying? thanks!

[RedWulf]

14 hours ago, Bl00dwing said:

I want to use this post to also ask for other OS that can boot from an usb that are a little bit more polished. is there anything worth trying? thanks!

most any os can, even windows. But your best option is mint 32 bit, its friendly to windows users and its lights so it should run on most any system you'll find. 

Same process, download the iso from its website and use rufus, lili, or yumi to burn it to the usb.

 

You can use most any linux distro(ubuntu, mint, zorin, fedora, suse) the same way. 

[Azgoth 2]

On 8/5/2016 at 1:50 AM, Bl00dwing said:

I want to use this post to also ask for other OS that can boot from an usb that are a little bit more polished. is there anything worth trying? thanks!

So almost ever OS I know of can boot from a USB in a live session, i.e., a "trial" so you can screw around before installing it", but this is different from an actual installation.  You usually have restrictions on persistent/saved data in live sessions, most notable.

 

That said, you absolutely can install most OSs to a flash drive, but you really, really shouldn't for most of them.  Since a flash drive is slower than a hard drive, more prone to wearing out from write cycles, and generally not an environment optimized for installing an OS to, a lot of your more full desktop OSs (e.g. Ubuntu, Linux Mint) aren't going to be good candidates.  You'll want to go for the extremely lightweight distros--even lighter than Lubuntu, ideally, since Lubuntu is designed to be the lightweight member of the "full-sized desktop" class.

 

There are a few very lightweight Linux distros that you definitely can make a full installation of on a flash drive.  These are pretty small distros, so they don't take up a lot of space, and the slower USB connection compared to SATA isn't as much of an issue.

• Puppy Linux--this is designed to be a lightweight OS that's also pretty user-friendly.  I haven't played with it much so I can't say quite as much about it as the others on this lit, but it's pretty well-regarded.  It's small and lightweight enough that you should be able to do a full installation to a flash drive.
• SliTaz--I actually have this one installed on a flash drive I carry around with me.  SliTaz is an extremely lightweight and quite minimalist Linux distro that's designed from the ground up to support installing to a hard drive or to an external device like a flash drive.  It uses a lot of extremely lightweight software and is a super slimmed down distro, but it's quite polished and generally very usable except for the sometimes spotty documentation.  It's not the most user-friendly to get set up and running, and it has some quirks to it that can take a little adjusting to, but this is probably the single best candidate for a permanent flash drive installation.  I can give you some more info on this one and some of my experiences if you're interested, since I've been using it on and off for a little while now.
• Tiny Core--this is sort of the modern contintuation of the now effectively dead Damn Small Linux project.  It's the smallest distro (or, hell, modern OS) that I know of--you can get a  barebones version with a full GUI for only 16MB (11 if you ditch the GUI), but there's a recommended version at 106MB that has more stuff pre-installed and pre-configured, though still not much.  This is probably better suited to an emergency recovery OS sort of use case, but might be worth looking into if you don't need anything too fancy.
• NanoLinux--this is a fork of Tiny Core, and every bit as small.  I have only booted it once in a virtual machine, so I can't say much about it, but I remember it feeling pretty well polished. Worth looking at.