Installing Suse on USB stick so only linux boots when stick is in and Windows when it's not

Good Morning,

I’m fairly new to Linux so please bear with me.

I have a 128GB memory stick. I would like to install Linux with KDE, Apache, PHP and a bunch of other tools on it. I’m pretty sure I have enough room to do that.

Question is how to do it such that when the USB is plugged in Linux boots and if it’s not plugged in Windows 8 boots. I’d like to do this without any changes to the MBR (Grub).

Could someone please post some links on how I can do this. I’ve already burned the iso image to a DVD.

Thanks for your help and patience.

Eric98

What about a live usb stick with persistent file system?

That should work as you intend.

See here: SDB:Live USB stick - openSUSE

Not sure if updates / or kernel upgrades will work though.

Cheers.

Otherwise you install it as usual and pay attention where you install the BOOT LOADER - you must install it on the root partition of the USB and NOT on /dev/sda /dev/sdx meaning not on the hard disk(s) nor in the MBR. Also, I believe you have to tick the option related to “set bootable flag on boot partition”.

Also, if you want to be sure that no changes will be done to your hard drives, just disconnect them when installing.

Cheers and good luck.

Would you like to configure the USB interfaces as the primary boot device in the BIOS of your computer eventually?

;)To the best of my knowledge, ( I run a test) Live USB does not update nor allow you to install additional applications. However, during the Linux installation you can add a partition on the stick (16 MB) and mount as your booting partition. Hence, you will only be able to boot Linux when the stick in plugged in and during the booting up of your machine you use the F12 or F8 function (depending on your machine bios.)
As a minimum, I do recommend that you install 5GB of SWAP in your hard drive

Thank you all for your help.

I want the ability to update and download applications such as Apache, Tomcat, PHP, Eclipse etc. All of the usual web programming tools.

The problem I’m running into now is with the Image Writer. It gives me the select button, I press it and . to find the iso file. The only other button is the copy button which gives me an error when I click on it. There isn’t a write button and I can’t select the USB stick or any other place to write to.

Any ideas? What did I do wrong?

Thanks
Eric98

You’re probably running imagewriter from a terminal, after invoking “su”. Rather use “su -” or use

gnomesu imagewriter

when on GNOME,

kdesu imagewriter

when on KDE.

Knurpht,

I’m trying to install this from my laptop which has Windows 8 to the 128GB USB 3 stick… I want to use the USB stick on different computers as I travel around.

Thanks,
Eric98

Win 8 ech maybe the same run under administrator. Problem maybe permissions to low level write to stick. Pure guess