Since 2007, I’ve been looking at the various most popular distribution packages of GNU/Linux. Linux is indeed a great alternative and a brilliant solution to build computer educational centers for free. I tried different types of installation, learning about the OS, as part of my personal education. I might indeed sooner or later have to setup community computer centers here and there.
Although the Internet offers a huge amount of information about Linux, I could not find any simple explanations on the Internet to install multiple Linux distribution packages on a USB disk and make it a bootable disk, I decided to share with you what I learnt. I hope you will find this information useful. Read the complete report here.
I’ve been trying to find a way to install multiple Linux distros on one USB stick for awhile, since they have different uses and tools, and have found your article and thought it was what I needed to accomplish my goal. I want to be able to choose from Backtrack, Tails, and possibly the RuntimeLive CD and GParted. At first I was simply installing each on my drive and then putting them back on the computer in a folder for each distro. Then, when I had done that with all of them I would extract the one I wanted to use on the next boot up and stick it’s files in the root of my drive, but that only works if I previously plug in the drive and move the files so I wanted to be able to choose if I would happen to use my drive on someone else’s computer.
You said to boot each distro I wanted to install from a LiveCD and install into the given partitions from there. However, with Backtrack I discovered that installing from the LiveCD would take up a lot more space than when I just installed it as a live CD using something such as Unetbootin. When using Unetbootin Backtrack only required 2.6 GB on my drive, but when installing to the drive using the LiveCD it required over 11 GB. Do I have to install them from the LiveCD or can I simply place the extracted files from the .iso in the partition and tell GRUB or whatever where to find them?
Thanks.
Have a look at YUMI – Multiboot USB Creator (Windows). This is the page to visit. “YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer), is the successor to MultibootISOs. It can be used to create a Multiboot USB Flash Drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, disc cloning, diagnostic tools, and more. Contrary to MultiBootISO’s which used grub to boot ISO files directly from USB, YUMI uses syslinux to boot extracted distributions stored on the USB device, and reverts to using grub to Boot Multiple ISO files from USB, if necessary.”