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.

Live persistent UEFI Bootable USB stick of Ubuntu 15.04.

I had purchased one 32 GB USB stick to back up Windows 8.1 installation on my Lenovo G50-45 Laptop before installing Ubuntu 14.04 in dual boot. Since the dual boot is working well and Windows recovery partition already exists on the Laptop I decided to have Live persistent Ubuntu 15.04 on the stick.

I created 2 GB Fat32 partition, 4 GB ext4 partition with label casper-rw and another 4 GB ext4 home-rw partition on the USB stick. Then I used start up disk creator to put Ubuntu 15.04 on Fat32 partition.

After booting I found that persistence did not work on UEFI machines since there was a bug in live usb creator. The work around was to edit the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file and put "persistent" before "quiet splash" in the menuentry.

Now my wifi settings and documents are avaiable on reboot.

I will try updating the system later on. Upgrades to packages like Firefox worked but when I upgraded the linux kernel I could not boot with or even without persistent boot parameter.

Today I made full install of Ubuntu 15.04 on the USB stick.

How to make UEFI Bootable Ubuntu 15.04 USB stick on Windows 8.1?

Since many years we download the Ubuntu ISO and use the installed Ubuntu to make a Start up Disk from the ISO to install on the same or other machines. The Start up disk is a UEFI Bootable USB stick.

Today I faced a question on Ubuntuforums about how to make UEFI Bootable Ubuntu 15.04 USB stick on Windows 8.1. I am doing it now on My Lenovo G50-45 Laptop on Windows 8.1. I have the Ubuntu 15.04 ISO on the drive. I have downloaded and installed md5 Calculator Application from Windows Store. I have checked the md5sum of the ISO and it is same as in this file.

I have downloaded 7-Zip 9.38 .msi file from here.
I have a 2 GB USB stick formatted in FAT32 in the USB slot.
I have extracted the ISO on the USB stick using 7-Zip.
I right click on Start Button and select Disk Management and find that the USB drive is Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)
I right click on Start Button, select Power Options/Choose what the power button does and uncheck Fastboot (if exixts)
I reboot holding the shift key.
On reboot I select use a device and EFI USB device and get options on Grub Menu to run Ubuntu without install.