Question Trying to Create Bootable USB X3 Partitions With Testing Distros

Can I have 3 different bootable Linux distro each on their own partitions on 1 USB thumbdrive, but what would happen when you insert the thumbdrive? Would a boot menu load first asking the user which partition you would like to start from?

I would like to eliminate any extra steps so that I can just plug in the thumbdrive and it goes into an autoloader mode to install the Linux distro, but a simple boot menu as described above is fine besides anything else further. Will this be possible and how much space would I need for this per partition, per Linux distro?

And with a new USB - (SanDisk Ultra Luxe 32GB USB 3.1 SDCZ74-032G-G46) after reformatting to EXT4 for these partitions will I be wiping away any vital Linux drivers or kernels that would prevent me from doing the set up what I’ve described above? thanks in advance for your advice.

 

This isn't a Unity related question. It has nothing to do here.

Yes you can have more than one Linux distro on any drive (including USB drive). What you have to do is install each distro on your drive, one after the other. Of course that mean creating one partition for each distro.

You will also need an EFI partition at the beginning of your drive. The installer can create it for you. All distro are going to use the same EFI partition. Each will put their own stuff in there. That mean you will get the GRUB menu at boot that will let you choose which distro you want to boot.

But again, this isn't the right place for this kind of question. You will get better advice if you ask the right people at the right place.

 

ok I'm not sure which section I should be in but just to be clear - I don’t want to run a Linux distro off of the USB thumb drive as a daily workstation, I want to just plug the USB into many different computers to autoload install full versions of different Linux distros into different computers.

Will Ventoy or PenDrive do what I have just described? …or does it act as “only” a portable Linux op system working off of a USB drive? I’m trying to understand the true purpose of it, or maybe it acts as both?

And with Ventoy I don’t actually need to have 3 different partitions with 1 distort in each to load into other computers, I can have just 1 partition and have multiple Linux distro autoloaders on it right?

 

So you want to make a USB drive which somewhat automatically install multiple Linux distros to the same computer? Or do you want USB drive which can be used to install any one of the Linux distros, but only one distro to single computer?


If it's the first cases, you might want to consider manually installing all the distros on single computer and then cloning whole disk. That will only work if you want to do it for a bunch of similar computers, I don't really know if that's applicable to your usecase.

If it's for some kind of classroom environment might also look into network boot solutions.

Tools like Ventoy or more aimed at making single USB drive which can be used to temporarily boot into bunch of different Linux distros. Once you boot into one, nothing stops you from running installer of currently active distro. But if want to install a bunch of them in a row to single computer process will still be quite manual.

 

okay so I was finally able to just now successfully install Ubuntu 22.04.2 Linux Lite 6.4.iso onto this small Asus TS10 VivoStick which has only 32 gb's HD on it. The Deepin' says it needed 64 gb's for an install, not sure why so much, it's crazy so I wasn't able to install my preferred distro.

I could not have done this install without this YouTube tutorial -

which gives a good and "real" step-by-step through the BIOS menus and blue screens. You can't just plug-in a USB and expect it to load up and its as simple as that. It doesn't work that way despite what people or YouTube says, there are these blue screen menu steps involved.

I am more than thrilled that I now have a viable route to get away from Windows forever. And now for some reason the 2nd boot menu loader E drive was showing up in Windows when it wasn't before.

Does anybody know how to permanently shutoff any and all automatic updates of all programs in Ubuntu? Does anybody here use Ubuntu and know how? I am a staunch non-believer in updates, I shut them off in all computers and PDA's I have. Windows auto-updates is what got me into this flooding of these small hard drives to begin with.

I don't know which final (or combo-of) distro(s) I will choose to put on these 4 mini-PC systems. I have 9 distros loaded onto this 1 USB partition now with Ventoy to explore. But my choices will be barebones, superlight systems with zero bloatware as I only use these mini-PC's to run a stock trading platform called Think or Swim and I don't use them for anything else. I use a Mac for my workhorse.