I want to like Linux, but it keeps failing on me

Recently I argued that running Firefox off a bootable copy of Linux on a CD or USB flash drive was an excellent approach for online banking. Windows users face a torrent of malware and, for many people, maintaining and using a Windows system securely requires too much time, effort and technical expertise.

And the fact that Linux can boot and run off a USB flash is undeniably cool. So cool, I've been trying it for a while now. Unfortunately, making it do anything other than Firefox has been a bust.

My latest experience started on a ThinkPad laptop running Ubuntu 9.04. I popped in the Ubuntu CD, a FAT32 formatted 4GB USB flash drive, and ran the USB Startup Disk Creator. This creates a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 that boots from and runs entirely off the flash drive.

Then I moved the flash drive (a.k.a thumb drive, memory stick, pen drive) to an Asus netbook, booted from it and ran Update Manager, the software update application, to get  the bug fixes since April.

I've done this enough to know that Update Manager initially lies to you and tells you that your system is up to date, when it's not. And I know that "Check" means check for missing patches, though I resent that it doesn't explicitly say "Check for new udpates" or something a bit more self-explanatory.

The udpates were applied and required a reboot, after which things went downhill.

First I noticed that it didn't automatically log into my WiFi network, something that has worked in many other copies of Ubuntu and other distributions. Then I noticed that the icon to install Ubuntu onto the hard drive was back on the desktop. I had removed it to prevent kicking off an install by accident.

Starting Firefox, I was congratulated by Mozilla for updating to version 3.0.13, a very familiar web page. But the other web page, was www.mozilla.org, rather than the usual home page. There was a blank line where the Bookmark toolbar should have been. There were no preset bookmarks and Firefox could not create any new bookmarks.  

What to do?

I went looking for more bug fixes and ran Update Manager again. Those of us that run Windows Update manually, know to get all the updates, reboot and then check again. Yes, Windows installs software with known bugs. Apparently Update Manager had done the same thing, as there were now 33MB worth of new patches.

But, they failed to install due a lack of space on the USB flash drive. Never mind that it has over a gigabyte of free space, when viewed on a Windows machine. Or, that I had allocated over a gigabyte for storing my files on the flash drive at the time it was created.

PREVIOUS FAILURES

Just last week I had done the same thing. I started with a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.04 on the same 4GB OCZ Rally 2 flash drive. That time, the first round of updates installed without problem and I used the system a while before getting adventurous and installing some software from appnr.com.

The site goes a long way to making it point-and-click simple to install applications on Ubuntu. But, when I tried to install VLC, it failed. Likewise, it wasn't happy installing Skype either. However, a handful of other applications installed easily. Out of the blue, after a few minutes, VLC installed itself, despite the initial error message. Very strange.

Nonetheless, I felt like I had seen the future. This may well be the new standard for installing Linux software. I hope so.

But, one the newly installed applications did the system in. Ubuntu wouldn't boot up any more, it fell back to text mode messages and then hung. Lesson to be learned: only install one application at a time, that way it's easy to point a finger at the problem.

I think the problematic application was the Wicd network manager, despite the fact that it seemed to run fine. For one thing, none of the other software was system related. Also, when the system froze during startup, the last message was about detecting the network adapter.   

But, I've had more than just these two copies of Ubuntu 9.04 rendered useless after installing patches.

The Asus netbook I mentioned earlier is running Easy Peasy. The distro, which is much like the Ubuntu netbook remix,  has its pros and cons, but one of the pros is not installing patches. The last clump of patches it tried to install failed, and it keeps trying and failing to install them over and over.

And, how did I come to install Easy Peasy on an Asus netbook that shipped with Linux? You guessed it, that system too, installed some patches and became unusable.
 
I've also tried running Mint from a USB flash drive using two different utilities to create the bootable copy of Mint. The first utility I tried (from USB Pen Drive Linux) offered the best of all worlds. When Mint first starts up, it asks if you want to run in persistent mode or if you want to throw away changes. This is great! And, it's something that Ubuntu does not offer when run from a flash drive.

Alas, installing patches did this distro in too. More than once.

Mint, being based on Ubuntu can run the same USB Startup Disk Creator utility. It doesn't come with it, but installing the application was easy. But, I had no better luck with this copy of Mint, it too, was done in by self-updates. 

At least with Windows, there's System Restore. It's brutally flawed but you have a fighting chance of restoring the system to the way it was before an update broke it. If there is something akin to System Restore on Linux, I haven't run across it.

And with Windows, I've been making disk image backups for years. They are the ultimate protection from any and all software problem. Before kicking the tires on any more Linux distirubutions, I've got to get up to speed on making Linux image backups. Ugh.