Portable bootable Toolkit

All that relates to the Annex Toolkit Utility
Post Reply
User avatar
Electroguard
Posts: 836
Joined: Mon Feb 08, 2021 6:22 pm
Has thanked: 268 times
Been thanked: 317 times

Portable bootable Toolkit

Post by Electroguard »

A linux bootable version of the Toolkit can be made on USB stick which can be used on different machines without needing to install linux or Annex Toolkit on those machines.

Or put another way… I have a 32Gb USB flash drive which I can boot to use the Annex Toolkit on any of my computers, irrespective of whatever OS they have installed.

The trick is to install the Toolkit on linux then create a bootable ISO snapshot of the system.
I use 'MX Snapshot' for creating an ISO image of MX Linux 19.4 (64 bit) complete with installed apps and configuration settings.
It's probably possible to do it with other linux flavours, but if using a different 'daily driver' you'll probably want to install the Toolkit to it anyway… so anything used as a temporary bootable Toolkit won't really matter cos it will be removed when done anyway.
Incidentally, MX has an autologon option, so it's not obligatory to keep entering a logon when using it.


A desktop installer icon is created in the snapshot for installation to a USB stick (or hdd), which then offers opportunity for adding subsequent apps (eg: WINE) or drivers etc to the installation, then creating a new snapshot ISO including all the updates.

But the quickest and easiest usage is simply to copy the resulting 2.6Gb ISO to a USB multi-menu boot stick such as Ventoy, and run as a 'live' image in ramdisk (it boots up in under a minute on all my machines). I could upload a ready-built image if someone cared to host it online for others to download, but it doesn't take long to build from scratch anyway.
Post Reply