Run Linux from encrypted flash drive??

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reneg8or

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So, now my system is running smooth and I am a happy renegade who had left the world of proprietary software and saw for myself how well Linux works. I have long been using LibreOffice but was educated by members about Kingsoft, which I have yet to try out. Both Thunderbird+Lightning and Evolution have pleased me and SyncEvolution sees my data synced with my "smart"phone.


I was planning to order a custom-built Mecer laptop as one can get much spec at a really fair price when ordering from ComX. Having said that, I will instead get a Dell with a 3 year on-site warranty. The Windows OS will remain intact and I can set up Linux as a dual-boot on a separate partition on the hard drive. A second option would be to run it from a drop-tested, military grade external hard drive or SSD. A third possibility is to operate it from flash or microSD.


I own quite a few portable memory devices and the Kingston and Transcend ones have proven to be very reliable. Sandisk: I had lost various SD, microSD and flash devices from that brand over the past year, to outright failure. They just stop working and neither my CPR nor that of a qualified technician could revive any of those.


I encrypt my OS partition and I presently also encrypt my memory cards/sticks.


Which is best for this: SD/microSD or flash drives?


When running Linux off such a portable device, how do I encrypt it if it has to be bootable? I have no experience of bootable memroy portable devices. Could someone with a good working knowledge and experience perhaps advise me?

Thanks in anticipation.
 
Running Linux from a flash drive or SD card works quite well with many distros but you do tend to take a performance penalty compared to booting from a SATA hard drive. For external hard drives eSATA or USB 3.0 would be best performance wise.

Another option that might interest you would be to run your Linux setup as virtual machines under VirtualBox (although you will have to sacrifice some of your processing power to the host OS in this configuration.)
 
InvisibleJim said:
Running Linux from a flash drive or SD card works quite well with many distros but you do tend to take a performance penalty compared to booting from a SATA hard drive. For external hard drives eSATA or USB 3.0 would be best performance wise.

Another option that might interest you would be to run your Linux setup as virtual machines under VirtualBox (although you will have to sacrifice some of your processing power to the host OS in this configuration.)
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I understand rhat the entire Linux (can) load into RAM and I plan to stick in 16GB as RAM is cheap. 8GB DDR3-1600 at R677. 2-4GB will be allocated to Intel HD4000 graphics that come with the i7 Quad Core 2.6Ghz Ivy Bridge CPU.


Someone said that flash drives are faster than SD - not sure about this either. My noob, layman's idea is to be doing all in RAM and r/w only when calling up user data or saving it to the memory stick.

Does this make logical sense?
 
reneg8or said:
I understand rhat the entire Linux (can) load into RAM and I plan to stick in 16GB as RAM is cheap. 8GB DDR3-1600 at R677. 2-4GB will be allocated to Intel HD4000 graphics that come with the i7 Quad Core 2.6Ghz Ivy Bridge CPU.


Someone said that flash drives are faster than SD - not sure about this either. My noob, layman's idea is to be doing all in RAM and r/w only when calling up user data or saving it to the memory stick.

Does this make logical sense?
Click to expand...

I suppose that is true about loading into RAM but there will still be some penalty for read/write to non-volatile storage. I'm not sure that this will necessarily only happen when you deliberately read or write a file to disk.

What I have observered is that Live CD's and booting from USB generally seem to run a bit slower on the same hardware compared to installing to disk.

Of course, it doesn't cost you much to try this out and prove me wrong!
 
If you can get ahold of one, a class 10 SD card will outperform a USB disk, unless the USB is very expensive.

That said, I'd boot from a hard disk 100 times over before I considered an SD card as my primary boot device, portable flash devices have a history of failing on me after a few months of constant on-time as a primary OS partition. Not sure if it's the write-limit or just bit rot.

Whatever you do, welcome to the world of linux! ( Though for me, Windows is still a superior desktop environment, if you take the time to install Cygwin - A bashlike shell for windows, which you can SSH, scp, wget, and all the other linux commandline tools out of )
 
LiveCD, also in my own experience, is notably slower than from HDD. It surely isn't your imagination *smile*
 
Yes, I also like Windows and that is why I consider keeping it for leisure use, with Linux on the business side of things.


However, I will be quite happy to have a laptop built with i5 2.6, 8gb ram and 1tb hdd. It will cost only R6,400 and that is my entire capital layout. With i7 2.4 and 16gb ram, it will cost R8k. I will save almost R2k on W7 ultim8 and a further R2.3k on MS Offfice. The savings pays for an HP ePrinter MFD and a eSATA backup drive! If going the Windows way, I will need the encryption levels of ultim8. ''lesser'' Windows also have encryption, but that loads after Win does, not before as in ultimate. In other words, that lesser encryption=no encryption!
 
bullzeye.za said:
If you can get ahold of one, a class 10 SD card will outperform a USB disk, unless the USB is very expensive.
Click to expand...

No. Class 10 is 10MB/s. Almost all newer flash's exceed this.

SD & CF are in orders of magnitude slower than SATA, even slower than most old IDE drives. Unless you have a very specific usage case you're more than likely wasting your time or just having fun experimenting ;)

The only reason we use microSD's is because some of the equipment we design is only 3x the size of the SD card. The only reason we use CF's is cost saving, space saving, close to zero disk writes. R50 (SD/CF) vs. R400 (HDD).
 
reneg8or said:
So, now my system is running smooth and I am a happy renegade who had left the world of proprietary software and saw
Which is best for this: SD/microSD or flash drives?
Click to expand...

SSD in 2.5" external eSATA/USB/USB3.0 enclosure. Most enterprise SSD's come with built-in hardware encryption with little to no performance hit.
 
nkawit said:
No. Class 10 is 10MB/s. Almost all newer flash's exceed this.

SD & CF are in orders of magnitude slower than SATA, even slower than most old IDE drives. Unless you have a very specific usage case you're more than likely wasting your time or just having fun experimenting ;)

The only reason we use microSD's is because some of the equipment we design is only 3x the size of the SD card. The only reason we use CF's is cost saving, space saving, close to zero disk writes. R50 (SD/CF) vs. R400 (HDD).
Click to expand...

OK, in the end one can get an excellent Tosh 1TB HDD <R1k, so using technology proveb and refined over half a century has to get my vote. Anything solid state seems to be more costly per GB and less reliable. Thanks for the tips.
 
With what you are trying to achieve, it may be worth trying a Wubi install of Ubuntu. Some other distributions also have an equivalent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(Ubuntu_installer)

This allows for an experience very similar to dual booting but without having to create a separate partition and you can simply uninstall it from Windows if you don’t like it.

You will need to change some settings under Synaptic for Grub updates if you don’t want the installation to break.
 
garyc said:
With what you are trying to achieve, it may be worth trying a Wubi install of Ubuntu. Some other distributions also have an equivalent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(Ubuntu_installer)

This allows for an experience very similar to dual booting but without having to create a separate partition and you can simply uninstall it from Windows if you don’t like it.

You will need to change some settings under Synaptic for Grub updates if you don’t want the installation to break.
Click to expand...

Thanks for reminding me of this: my IQ was tested as an adult and I did fare well above average but I think that there are some bad clusters or bitrot setting in as I tend to forget about little gems like this. Thanks to you, I can revisit a path once travelled with great success as I had Ubuntu running from within Windows like this a few years ago; maybe late 2008 or even 2009. Can't recall as my cerebral drive is a bit fragmented, I suppose. maybe too much FAT in the diet! Or do I need a furlong to go defrag my mind a bit?
 
reneg8or said:
... I plan to stick in 16GB as RAM is cheap. ...
Click to expand...
Be sure to do your homework about the RAM and 32/64bit. Mr. Linus advise to go 64-bit for >4GB(if I recall correctly).
If you plan to go 64-bit, you should be sorted. Going 32-bit with 16GB ram will take some tweaking.
 
Nephew said:
Be sure to do your homework about the RAM and 32/64bit. Mr. Linus advise to go 64-bit for >4GB(if I recall correctly).
If you plan to go 64-bit, you should be sorted. Going 32-bit with 16GB ram will take some tweaking.
Click to expand...

It's not advice. It's facts. A 32 bit address space cannot address more than 4GB of RAM. No matter how you tweak it.
 
Sinbad said:
It's not advice. It's facts. A 32 bit address space cannot address more than 4GB of RAM. No matter how you tweak it.
Click to expand...

Actually, correct on most levels. But for those that want more technicalities....

Hardware & software wise PAE can address up to 64GB RAM using 2MB page tables, and 2M is not the largest page table.

Enabling PAE consumes around 256Mb RAM for the virtual to physical memory translations with 2M page tables.

On the OS side of things...
Windows 7 supports up to 64 GB ram on 32-bit platforms, as does Windows 2003 Enterprise.
I believe Linux uses the HUGETLB kernel feature for exactly this. (Last time I used more than 4Gb RAM on a 32bit platform was years ago)

Sinbad, you are however 100% correct, a 32-bit APPLICATION is limited by fundamental design to only have access to 32 bits worth of addressable space. ie. 4Gb.

So to sum it up, you can have a 32bit system with 64GB ram, but each application can only see 4GB of that RAM.
 
Sinbad said:
It's not advice. It's facts. A 32 bit address space cannot address more than 4GB of RAM. No matter how you tweak it.
Click to expand...
Actually not, but it is complicated
http://superuser.com/questions/367490/can-a-32-bit-os-machine-use-up-all-8gb-ram-20gb-page-file
The most that the process can address is 4GB. You are potentially confusing memory with address space. A process can have more memory than address space. That is perfectly legal and quite common in video processing and other memory intensive applications. A process can be allocated dozens of GB of memory and swap it into and out of the address space at will. Only 2 GB can go into the user address space at a time
Click to expand...
And much more articles if you google. We do 16GB on our 32-bit linux distros, we tried 32GB, but gave up for now.
But it may not be advisable, especially these days as more applications are available for 64-bit.
 
Nephew said:
Be sure to do your homework about the RAM and 32/64bit. Mr. Linus advise to go 64-bit for >4GB(if I recall correctly).
If you plan to go 64-bit, you should be sorted. Going 32-bit with 16GB ram will take some tweaking.
Click to expand...

I want to ise PCLinuxOS Full Monty but it doesn't come in 64-bit. Also, it does >4GB with fair ease.
 
nkawit said:
Actually, correct on most levels. But for those that want more technicalities....

Hardware & software wise PAE can address up to 64GB RAM using 2MB page tables, and 2M is not the largest page table.

Enabling PAE consumes around 256Mb RAM for the virtual to physical memory translations with 2M page tables.

On the OS side of things...
Windows 7 supports up to 64 GB ram on 32-bit platforms, as does Windows 2003 Enterprise.
I believe Linux uses the HUGETLB kernel feature for exactly this. (Last time I used more than 4Gb RAM on a 32bit platform was years ago)

Sinbad, you are however 100% correct, a 32-bit APPLICATION is limited by fundamental design to only have access to 32 bits worth of addressable space. ie. 4Gb.

So to sum it up, you can have a 32bit system with 64GB ram, but each application can only see 4GB of that RAM.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clear explanation, which is how I also understand it to be. I am only going to stick in 16GB of RAM as that is how much a Mecer W25CEV notebook can take. RAM is cheap at R670/8GB DDR3-1600. It will equip the machine now for future ability. My oldest notebook in daily use hails from 2003 and runs Ubuntu 11.04 in 1GB DDR. 256MB was the norm back then, I now reap the benefit of having gone overboard back then.


This machine is going to be employed as a low volume home office mail & Funambol server in future and it may see another decade of good use, if no hardware fails.
 
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