Install Xubuntu 9.10 to a Flash Drive using Windows

In the following tutorial, we will show you How to Create a USB Persistent Xubuntu 9.10 Flash Drive using Windows and our custom installer script. Xubuntu 9.10, a product of Canonical Ltd is basically Ubuntu with a XFCE desktop GUI. Xubuntu is designed to use less system resources than Ubuntu or Kubuntu, which gives us even more reason to run it from a portable device. Upon completion, you will have a Xubuntu 9.10 Flash Drive that should boot and run on any PC that supports booting from USB.

Xubuntu 9.10 Desktop Screenshot

Distribution Home Page: xubuntu.org

Minimum Flash Drive Capacity: 2GB

Persistent Feature: Yes

Essentials for creating a Xubuntu 9.10 Live USB

• Windows PC to perform conversion
• Xubuntu 9.10 ISO (downloaded via a bittorrent client)
  
• 2GB or larger USB flash drive (Fat32 formatted)
  
• USB-Installer-for-Xubuntu.exe (contains the files to do the conversion)

Creating a Xubuntu 9.10 Live USB Flash Drive in Windows

Update 12/24/09: Fixed initrd naming during the install so that System updates continue to work.

1. Download the Xubuntu 9.10 torrent and use your favorite bittorent client to download the ISO
2. Download and run our third party USB-Installer-for-Xubuntu.exe, following the onscreen instructions
3. Once the script has finished, restart your PC and set your BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from the USB device, save your changes and reboot

If all went well, you should now be booting from your very ownl Xubuntu 9.10 Live USB with the option to save changes that you make back to the USB device and restore those changes on subsequent boots.

Persistence size: The default casper-rw loop block file that becomes the partition for saving changes is only 1GB.

Update: The Casper-RW Creator now merged into USB Installer, allows you to create a 1GB to 4GB casper-rw file.

However, If you prefer to resize your casper-rw disk block image file and use more USB storage space for saving changes post install, you can resize casper-rw from Windows or resize casper-rw using Linux

Posted under: Flash drive installs using Windows