Help Create LiveUSB with saving change

I did not use the method in the Trisquel wiki, but I did get Trisquel with persistence set up using Ventoy. It appears to me that all of Ventoy is GPLv3 software or GPL compatible. If anyone knows of any different licensing info, or if there are proprietary parts I'm not aware of, please leave me a note about it.

Here's a how-to with the steps for creating a Ventoy USB drive with persistence for Trisquel:

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For these steps, my user name, Trisquel version number, and ventoy version number are as follows, yours will possibly be different:
User name: trisquel
Trisquel version: trisquel_11.0.1_amd64
Ventoy version: ventoy-1.1.02

0. Download the latest Trisquel ISO from https://trisquel.info/en/download to your ~/Downloads/ folder.
In my case, it is trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.iso

1. Download the latest Ventoy release from https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases/ to your ~/Downloads/ folder.
Download the file that ends in "linux.tar.gz" to your ~/Downloads/ folder. In my case it was ventoy-1.1.02-linux.tar.gz

2. Open your caja file manager, go to your Downloads folder, right click on the Ventoy file you downloaded and select the "Extract here" option.
This will create a new folder, in my case it is ~/Downloads/ventoy-1.1.02/
Go into that new folder.

3. Insert your USB drive that you want to have Trisquel with persistence on.
NOTE THAT YOU WILL BE DESTROYING ALL DATA ON THE USB DRIVE WITH THESE INSTRUCTIONS - BE SURE YOU'VE BACKED UP ANY IMPORTANT DATA YOU WERE SAVING ON THE USB DRIVE TO ANOTHER LOCATION.

Find your USB drive device location on your computer. I like to use the GParted program on Trisquel to look at the data on all the drives before I over-write a USB drive. My USB drive is a 16GB USB stick, so I look through the different drives in gparted and find that the USB drive is listed as a 16GB /dev/sda drive on my system. It will probably be different on yours - BE SURE AND FIND THE CORRECT PATH TO YOUR USB DRIVE OR OTHERWISE YOU'LL END UP OVERWRITING SOME OTHER DRIVE BY MISTAKE - VERY BAD IDEA!!

4. Install Ventoy to the USB drive, using a script called "Ventoy2Disk.sh" provided in the Ventoy folder you downloaded and extracted.

In caja, I right click in the ~/Downloads/ventoy-1.1.02/ folder and select the option to "Open in terminal".

Then I run this command:
sudo sh Ventoy2Disk.sh -i /dev/sda

Be sure to put the correct path for your USB drive in the command in place of my /dev/sda

The script will tell you some data about your drive - BE SURE IT'S THE CORRECT USB DRIVE DATA that's listed. Here's some of the output I got:

>**********************************************
> Ventoy: 1.1.02 x86_64
> longpanda name at domain
> https://www.ventoy.net
>**********************************************
>
>Disk : /dev/sda
>Model: SanDisk Cruzer Glide (scsi)
>Size : 14 GB
>Style: MBR
>
>
>Attention:
>You will install Ventoy to /dev/sda.
>All the data on the disk /dev/sda will be lost!!!
>
>Continue? (y/n)

5. In caja, under your 'Devices' section on the left sidebar, you should now have a "Ventoy" device. Click on it to mount it.

You should now have a Ventoy directory on the USB drive which will be in the path /media/$USER/Ventoy/, where "$USER" is your username on the system

Go to that location in caja and create three new folders in the /media/$USER/Ventoy/ folder. Name them "ISO", "persistence" and "ventoy". So the output of 'ls /media/$USER/Ventoy/' should be:
$ ls /media/trisquel/Ventoy/
ISO persistence ventoy

6. In caja, copy the Trisquel ISO that you downloaded from the ~/Downloads/ folder to the /media/$USER/Ventoy/ISO/ folder. Now I have the following file in place:
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/ISO/trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.iso

7. Install persistence.

In caja, go to /media/$USER/Ventoy/persistence/

Right-click in caja and select "Open in terminal", so you have /media/$USER/Ventoy/persistence/ opened in the terminal. While in that folder, you will be running the script "CreatePersistentImage.sh" from the ~/Downloads/ventoy-x.x.xx/ folder (as above, mine is in ~/Downloads/ventoy-1.1.02/).

The default size of the persistence file that is created is 1024MB (1GB), but I needed a larger one as I was intending to update Trisquel and add programs, so I used the "-s" option to create a larger persistence file of 10240MB, which is closer to 10GB. [Note - the larger the persistence file, the longer the time this script will take to run. Don't be surprised if it takes over a half hour to create a 10GB persistence file. If you are using an older computer, you may want to create a much smaller persistence file so that it doesn't take hours to complete].

The default name of the persistence file that is created is "persistence.dat", but I need a file named after the name of my version of Trisquel, which will be "trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.dat", so I use the "-o" option to specify the name:
sudo sh ~/Downloads/ventoy-1.1.02/CreatePersistentImg.sh -s 10240 -o trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.dat

Now I have the following file in place:
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/persistence/trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.dat

8. Create a .json file

We need a .json file for Ventoy to know where the persistence file is located for Trisquel.

Open the Pluma text editor, and paste the following into a new text file, changing the Trisquel version numbers to fit with your version numbers (remove the blank lines that are created by the Trisquel forum - the file should look like the text file that I'm attaching to this post):

{
"persistence": [
{
"image": "/ISO/trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.iso",
"backend": "/persistence/trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.dat"
}
]
}

Now save this file as /media/$USER/Ventoy/ventoy/ventoy.json

Now I have the following file in place:
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/ventoy/ventoy.json

9. You should be done. The output of 'ls -R /media/$USER/Ventoy/' should now be as follows:
$ ls -R /media/trisquel/Ventoy/
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/:
ISO persistence ventoy
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/ISO:
trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.iso
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/persistence:
trisquel_11.0.1_amd64.dat
/media/trisquel/Ventoy/ventoy:
ventoy.json


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At this point, you should be able to reboot with the USB drive inserted.

BE SURE TO UNMOUNT THE USB DRIVE BEFORE REBOOTING - otherwise Trisquel might hang for 5 minutes or longer while trying to reboot. You can unmount it by clicking the red arrow next to the Ventoy drive in the caja 'Devices' left sidebar. Since you unmounted it, you may need to pull the USB out and put it back in the USB slot to be recognized once you reboot - probably depends on your computer model.

When you boot to the USB drive, select Ventoy, then Trisquel, and then Trisquel with the persistence option, and you should be up and running.