Review of antiX-15 USB persist on UEFI Secure Boot.

On 30th June 2015 new version of antiX called antiX-15 (Killah P) was released. I was impressed with the announcement "Want to run live on a box with UEFI bootloader? antiX can do this", and immediately wanted to test this.

I downloaded antiX-15-V_64-full.iso from souceforge. The announcement recommended Unetbbotin to make live usb but unfortunately Unetbootin crashed while selecting the iso file. I used dd command to copy the iso to usb but it allowed me to boot only in Legacy mode of BIOS.

I posted on antiX Forum and was advised to mount the iso and simply copy the contents (same like what I recommend for Ubuntu 14.04 for UEFI)

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop,ro  antiX-15-V_64-full.iso /mnt/iso
cp -a /mnt/iso/. /media/USB_mount_point/

 After selecting boot from usb in BIOS Boot Menu I could boot into antiX default Desktop with secure boot on since antiX has Microsoft signed kernel image.

Then I wanted to make the usb persistent. I used the cheat-code "persist=root!,home" in grub boot line but was getting blank screen.

I created the rootfs and homefs files and placed them in /antiX folder on usb even then it did not work:

dd if=/dev/zero of=rootfs bs=1M count=0 seek=1024
mkfs.ext4 -q -m 0 -O ^has_journal -F rootfs
dd if=/dev/zero of=homefs bs=1M count=0 seek=1024
mkfs.ext4 -q -m 0 -O ^has_journal -F homefs 

After struggling for a day I was told to change "gfxpayload=text" to "gfxpayload=keep" in grub.cfg and it worked.