Tell me your favourite rescue USB image and why!

Also rescue tips and tricks as that’s always interesting.

I have been using a Debian installer USB as I had it to hand (DVD image IIRC) but if I boot into a shell without mounting another root FS the number of utilities is quite limited (just busybox basics). For example just now I wanted gzip but it only had gunzip…

I feel like a shell started from the installer USB should have access to a lot more utilities because the files are there on the disk!

Does anyone know a way to set up a kind of USB like the debian installer where you can install packages from the installer into the live environment?

  • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Slower than the kind of shell you get in the Debian installer?

    Is it slower because it’s trying to log and write to the root fs whereas the installer runs everything in RAM and doesn’t write to the USB?

    • taipan_snake@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Yeah I think so. There are some optimisations that can be done to improve things, but at the end of the day it’s running off a slow USB drive