Carrying your private OS with you on an encrypted USB stick is very useful.
Here are my personal notes how I did this. I have written them carefully, however I assume no responsibility for them.
What you need:
Installing Debian on a USB Stick with encryption
dd or on windows use ''Rufus''Post install work:
/etc/apt/sources.list and add non-free contrib to all lines after main, like so:... deb http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/debian/ jessie main non-free contrib deb-src http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/debian/ jessie main non-free contrib ...
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade; sudo apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree By default, the ext3/ext4 filesystem updates the access time attribute on a file system object whenever it's read. This results in even the most trivial file reads result in a write operation. Keeping the access time updated is only important for some very specific tasks which we're not likely to come across.
Open /etc/fstab and for each mount that is on your USB storage, add a noatime parameter. For example:
/dev/mapper/vg_root-lv_root / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
Becomes:
/dev/mapper/vg_root-lv_root / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
There should be no application that writes data that needs to be persistant to the /tmp directory. Let's move it into RAM so there are no disk reads or writes associated with it's usage.
Append the following to /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
This one is purely for appearances. It can be disconcerting if you start up your machine and you get a blank screen for an extended period. This does happen though while the Kernel and InitRAMFS images are loaded from your slower storage. There is a simple alteration that makes Grub output a little imformation to let you know that things are happening
Open /etc/grub.d/10_linux and find the following stanza:
linux_entry "${OS}" "${version}" false \
"${GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX} ${GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA} ${GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT}" \
quiet
We're just going to remove the quiet option:
linux_entry "${OS}" "${version}" false \
"${GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX} ${GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA} ${GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT}"
Note: notice that the '\' is also removed from the second line. Even more output
If you're after even more output so you can watch the kernel go through it's startup, you can turn on verbose output.
Open /etc/default/grub and find the following line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
Add the verbose option:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="verbose"
Now, use update-grub to apply your changed setting to grub.cfg and restart for the change to take effect.
sudo update-grub sudo reboot
Reference: http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/
The default IO Scheduler used by Ubuntu is cfq. Changing this to deadline will see improved performance during times where multiple processes are trying to read/write to disk. You can change the default scheduler for all devices by adding a kernel parameter into grub.
Open /etc/default/grub and find the following line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
Add the elevator option:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="elevator=deadline"
Or, if you added the verbose option earlier:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="elevator=deadline verbose"
Now, use update-grub to apply your changed setting to grub.cfg and restart for the change to take effect.
sudo update-grub sudo reboot
To see that your new scheduler has taken effect you can query which scheduler is currently in use for a specific device with this command:
cat /sys/block/<device>/queue/scheduler
To save more power when using sata drives, consider https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagementALPM
Ref: http://ghanima.net/doku.php?id=wiki:linuxtips:runningfromusb