Absolute beginner installing CentOS to a usb drive

[Scott Horne]

Hello all! I am an absolute newb to linux and would appreciate a bit of help.

I would like to install CentOS and the Gnome gui to a flash drive in such a fashion that I may insert the drive, start my laptop and run linux. Pull the drive, restart and run my currently installed windows 10 (For games, etc.) Everything I've found on the web so far details how to put the -Installer- on the flash drive, but not being able to boot CentOS from the flash drive.

Keep in mind that I am completely new to linux and still have a lot to learn. Is there a how-to or procedure that I've just not found? Any help would be appreciated.

[TrevorH]

I'd recommend using a virtual machine instead.

[Scott Horne]

I could do that, but the whole point of this exercise is to be able to run linux without windows 10 slowing everything down. I just would like to be able to run either CentOS or Windows as I need and this seemed the best way to do it on my machine.

[tunk]

Most USB memory sticks are relatively slow. So unless it's a very fast one, the memory stick may be the bottleneck. Also a VM is more flexible, as you don't have to reboot every time you switch.

[TrevorH]

Unless your machine is very short of resources then a VM is almost certainly the easiest route to go and the speed shouldn't be that much different to running on bare metal. Since you're not aiming to use linux for games or anything that requires fast video support, it doesn't sound like you have a great need to run it natively. Get some experience with it and then think about whether to run on bare metal. With a VM it's easy to clean up your mistakes - most VM hosting software has the ability to take snapshots as you go so if you do something wrong, you can revert to an earlier snapshot and carry on.

[Scott Horne]

Good points, all. Thank you. Just to make sure I understand what you're saying, running CentOS in a virtual machine won't significantly slow things down? The only virtual machine software I'm familiar with is VMware, BTW.

[TrevorH]

The overhead of VM software these days is very low so I wouldn't expect it to affect anything (I have 100 VMs in production). On windows you have quite a bit of choice - there's VM hosting software - Hyper-V - that's part of Windows itself, there's vmware (they do a free edition) and virtualbox.

[Scott Horne]

Thank you for the information!