Arch on a USB drive - Good idea?

[Kongar]

I've run Ubuntu and Mint in VMs. I'm not afraid of the command prompt. I get things done with linux - oftentimes slowly and often accompanied by the usual noob amount of "wtf - peruse forums - aha!" But VMs are slow and whatnot...

I want the full linux experience, and I want to learn. But I don't really want to mess with my primary partition/system. I want to use something a little less "click this button to install everything" distro. So I was thinking Arch installed to a fast USB drive (like a fast 64GB drive). Not ala live cd style - but an actual installation onto the stick. Then I can just access my hard drives as they already are - storage places for music and movies.

That should do the trick right? Stupid endeavor or reasonable? I need to read up on the new uefi grub replacement thing too - but it seems like I should be able to do this and boot off the stick when I want to run linux (with minimal risk to my noob ways wrecking the machine - ya images/backups and all but that's a pain to reload). What do you all think?

 

[krogen]

It doesn't matter how fast your drive is if you're limited by the bus itself, assuming you'd use USB 2.

A VM would probably be much faster, at least when it comes to disk read / writes. Beyond that I don't know too much about VMs.

If you have an old drive lying around, do a proper installation. Install the distro, install GRUB into mbr, and in the bios switch the primary boot drive to your Linux drive. That way you don't have to fiddle around with partitions and if you don't like it, simply switch the primary drive back to your "Windows" drive. Obviously, you can also add a Windows entry to GRUB so you don't have to switch drives.

Painless and safe process, just requires an extra drive.

Last but not least, not to be butt hole, but if you're calling a shell a command prompt, perhaps it's better to start with Ubuntu. If you're feeling truly adventurous, go ahead, but you might be in for a world of hurt. Arch is much friendlier than a typical Gentoo installation but it's still far from trivial if you don't know exactly what you need from the top of your head.

 

[Prav]

If you want an introductory distro based on Arch I would suggest Manjaro.

 

[Kongar]

Heh, I meant command line but prompt came out. Product of windows for a very long time. Either way - I'm still terribad at it I'm sure. Used AIX back in college quite a bit, and actually installed a version of linux on a 386 way back when. Complied my kernels off my many floppy disks, installed X, and mostly was pumped to get mosaic and a terminal going. But let's be honest - things have progressed quite a bit in 20 years, and I feel left behind.

Ubuntu is, for all intents and purposes, windows. You download an iso, click install, and use the GUI that comes with it to facebook. =\ I long for control of my computer - where I knew what every single file did because I put it there... I still don't know what ubuntu's doing because I didn't set anything up. It just does stuff and things and, well you get the idea. I want to screw up and be in a world of hurt, that's how you learn. I guess I was just looking for a way to totally F with things with no consequences. I may just dust off an old PC and go to town on that... VMs do have limitations, and I wasn't thinking about USB bus speeds being a bottleneck. Hmmm...

Well thanks for your thoughts - exactly what I was looking for. Food for thought.

 

[jwcalla]

Ubuntu is, for all intents and purposes, windows. You download an iso, click install, and use the GUI that comes with it to facebook. =\ I long for control of my computer - where I knew what every single file did because I put it there... I still don't know what ubuntu's doing because I didn't set anything up. It just does stuff and things and, well you get the idea. I want to screw up and be in a world of hurt, that's how you learn. I guess I was just looking for a way to totally F with things with no consequences.

If you want to be in a world of hurt with things totally F'd up, just install Ubuntu 12.04. Believe me, there are so many show-stopping bugs in that release that you'll be digging in to fix your system on a common basis.

Otherwise I agree with the deficiencies of the VM approach and suggest just grabbing a cheap disk or used SSD and using that as the install target.