Hey,

I’m looking for a live OS that I can run from a USB on any phone - but if only Android/non iPhone phones are possible, that’s good too.

I know of etchdroid and running e.g. tails from that using the phone as a PC, and I’m aware that most or all Linux distros can run live from USB into PC, but I’m looking for something that I can have on a USB, plugin to any phone and run it. Save files, maybe apps onto it so that the next time I run it on any other phone, it will take up from where I left off and I can still use the same software that I installed on it.

I have recently heard of plug os which reminded me to look for this again, but plugos.net is a million miles out of my budget or what I’m willing to pay for something like that.

Are there any others? Free or (much) cheaper?

EDIT -

THANKS EVERYONE! 👍🙌

It seems that it’s not possible, and that the one I thought was similar to what I was looking for, is actually a modified Android version that runs from a custom built usb stick.

So not possible (at least for now 🤞).

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    1·
    15 hours ago

    I don’t know of any project to do this, but it’s an interesting idea.

    For most/all phones, you would need to break the phone’s software security to boot another OS. To boot via USB the phone’s firmware would need to support that, or a sufficient USB vulnerability could be used to take over a running system and boot into a new OS. This would almost certainly be unreliable and only work on specific devices.

    Note that if part of your goal is to extract data from the phone, only old phones store data unencrypted these days. One advantage of using a vulnerability to hijack the current os would be the availability of the keys to decrypt the phone’s storage if the storage is already unlocked.

    Although it’s not as interesting, you certainly can load firmware on an android device that will boot from USB. Not sure if this already exists or would need to be built.