How to install Manjaro on a USB with persistent storage

Manjaro on a USB

Linux is the kernel that Linus Torvalds has developed for decades and on which hundreds of operating systems are based. Among so many options, the logical thing is that each one has a favorite distribution, such as Kubuntu for me, Fedora for others or Arch Linux for others. But the good thing is that we can use other distributions without touching anything we have installed, and in this article we are going to show you the best way to install Manjaro on a USB with persistent storage.

To do the same with distributions like Ubuntu, you have to do very different steps that sometimes lead us to create a Live USB in which the changes will be maintained, but Manjaro has done something very different: launch a special image for us to dump on a pendrive. The steps are very simple, but keep in mind that, at least at the time of writing this article, what is available is only the XFCE version.

How to install Manjaro XFCE on a pendrive

  1. The first thing we have to do is download the xfce-usb image, the latest version of which is in this link. If you read this article after a few months, go to this other link; hopefully in addition to the XFCE version they have also created the KDE and GNOME images.
  2. Unzip the downloaded file.
  3. Now we have to dump the image on the pendrive. This can be done in different ways. Manjaro recommends Etcher, but I did it with the "dd" method, as we explained in how to dump the images for the PineTab here.
  4. Once the image is uploaded to the pendrive, we can use it on any computer, something we can do directly to check that everything has gone well. The username is "manjaro" and the password is "manjaro", both without quotes. To be able to use Manjaro from the USB, you have to start from it, and the way to do it will depend on the computer. Some boot directly from the USB drive, and others require this behavior to be configured.
  5. You will realize that the hard drive only has 8GB, although your pendrive is of greater capacity. What we have to do to increase the size is to put the pendrive back in a Linux computer, use GParted or a similar tool, select the drive and expand it. As simple as that.

If we want to use another graphical environment, such as Plasma, we can install it from pamac (the app with GUI) and choose it from the login. I am using it in a Lenovo with an i3 processor and 4GB of RAM where I have left Windows and I can only say that now I will use it more.


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  1.   Victor said

    Good!! I would like to know if after creating a live usb I can continue using the pendrive to save things. That is, if once I save the iso I will NOT be able to use it to save movies and files, etc.

    Can I have several linux live ISOs on a pendrive?

    Buy a large capacity usb and have everything there (iso linux live, music, movies, etc), or have at least 2 (in one the linux live and in another several files)?