Running Debian wheezy from a USB stick in read and write mode, and maintaining the changes between reboots ( persistent )

My mission: at the office there are WINDOWS computers that don’t run 24/7, they are on a few hours a day, and i would like to make those computers do some processing for my programs at night and when they are not in use. to run my programs they need to be running linux, so here is my plan.

One very simple way is to install a second hard drive on those computers and boot from it (Because i dont want to touch drives that have people’s data. But this is alot of work, and i don’t want to end up having people accidentally booting the second drive or even have an extra spinning disk in the computer that does absolutly nothing while people are working with windos.

So, My plan is to get cheap 4GB flash pen drives and boot all those computers from them.

Step 1: get debian live (http://live.debian.net/) iso file

I am downloading debian-live-7.0.0-amd64-standard.iso.log But if you want a desktop GUI environment like gnome or KDE you should get a different file.

Step 2: Dump the ISO file onto the flash stick, on windows this can simply be done with
Step 3: Change some stuff to make the live image persistent and not read only (Could be step 2, or 3 if we mount the USB and edit directly)
Step 4: Deploy

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *