Trisquel On A Sugar Toast - USB startup disk with persistence

I tried installing Sugar in Ubuntu 10.04, but according to the official wiki, there are issues. So instead I was using a live CD. This was OK, but all changes were lost after a reboot. I was pleased to find an easier and more flexible solution: a Sugar USB startup disk with persistence.

1. Download the ISO

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast#Download
Currently Sugar 0.86.2 with the Fructose and Honey activities built on top of Trisquel 3.0 (based on Ubuntu 9.04).

2. Use Virtualbox to launch the OS.

3. Create a USB startup disk.

The official instructions say to open the terminal and type usb-creator, but that command doesn't exist. It's usb-creator-gtk.

4. Using the GUI, create the startup disk.

Insert your USB stick before or after running usb-creator-gtk, it doesn't matter. Make sure to specify how much space you want to use for saving files / settings. Creating the startup disk will take a few minutes. If there are existing files on the disk, they won't be erased.

5. Additional tweaks:

The default timeout at the main boot menu is 30 seconds. I like to change this to something smaller to speed up the boot process. Boot into your regular OS, insert the USB stick and edit /syslinux/syslinux.cfg. Find the line: TIMEOUT 300 and change it. I set mine to 20 which is 2 seconds.

6. Reboot using the USB stick.

Make any changes / updates you want. One thing I noticed was that the sound was muted by default, so make sure to turn it on. Move the mouse to a corner, then click the speaker icon in the lower right.

7. Backup the persistence file

I like to create a backup copy of the persistence file in the case that I want to revert back to my "default" settings or create another USB stick. In your OS of choice, backup the casper-rw file from the USB stick.

A final observation: delete journal entries if an application is slowing down or having issues. This was the solution when Physics started becoming very slow after a lot of shapes were added and existed somewhere offscreen.