Hi Paul,
we regularly and successfully use USB sticks for courses where participants bring their own notebooks. What we found:
a) the sticks should be fast USB3 (very good results with SANdisk Extreme 32GB). The computers do _not_ have to be recent, nor do they have to have USB3 ports
b) we produce >50% BIOS-bootable sticks and the rest are EFI-bootable sticks (we have not yet found out how to combine this into one). The latter can be booted on Macbooks as well; their hardware works well with Fedora 23. For Windows clients, one has to make sure that "fast boot" (or "fast startup") is disabled (or Shift is pressed while shutting Windows down), and sometimes powercfg -H off is additionally required; otherwise the USB stick may not boot. Occasionally we find a computer that does not boot from any of the sticks because the BIOS screen can not be reached or some such, but 19 out of 20 work as they should.
c) We use Fedora (latest) with ext4 filesystem and data=writeback,nobarrier in fstab. The writeback option on the / filesystem needs a little tune2fs exercise but the stick is as fast as a local harddisk. We always create a few-GB FAT32 partition because that makes file exchange very simple
d) We just install CCP4 and whatever else we need, and then dd (on a machine with USB3 ports) an image of that stick to all other sticks.
e) any number of bells and whistles could be added to this, like clients sending their hostnames to a server after booting, and accepting updates by rsync.
To make students familiar with the sticks and how to boot them, one needs 30+ minutes and a few tutors. The big benefit is that students learn Linux, and realize that they can easily use the hardware they already own. Current notebook hardware is by far fast enough for data processing, structure solution and coot visualization.
If somebody figures out how to install Fedora23 sticks that boot on both Bios- and EFI hardware, I'd like to hear about this.
I hope the above is useful for you or anybody else interested.
best,
Kay
On Tue, 12 Jan 2016 20:25:44 -0500, Paul Paukstelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I'm curious if there would be interest in a macromolecular
>crystallography linux distribution that would come with the major
>software packages (ccp4, phenix, etc.) pre-installed. I was initially
>thinking about this for academic training purposes. It would be nice to
>have something that could be booted up as a live session off a USB (or a
>full installation) that could be distributed to a class to run through
>some basics. However, I could also see this potentially having wider
>appeal. The tricky part, of course, would be handling licenses in some
>cases. Thoughts?
>
>--paul
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