As there are detailled descriptions on how to install Ubuntu on an USB stick (aka “pen drive” or “flash drive”) they assume you have a running Ubuntu System.

To install a CD installation image on an USB stick with any Linux distro, just use dd to put the *.img file on the sticks device (i.e. not on a partition).

dd if=/path/to/ubuntu-X.XX.X-Arch.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

After this, you can run your favourite *fdisk and add partions to use the remaining space on the stick for other purposes.

For some reason, the hibernated state was ignored on system start on an Ubuntu 11.10 laptop I am maintaining. On this system, the problem was solved by installing uswsusp:

aptitude install uswsusp

Other resources on the web indicate, that on system start, the swap partition might not be identified. It was recommended to identifify the UUID of the swap partition by

blkid

and use this in configuration files to specify the partition. See

• http://freejabber.com/2012/02/07/fixing-ubuntu-hibernate-sleep-to-disk-when-resume-never-works/
• http://chriseiffel.com/everything-linux/step-by-step-how-to-get-hibernate-working-for-linux-ubuntu-11-04-mint-11/

for more details.

Installing cryptsetup (by dependencies, not using it) seemed to break resume on one laptop (it freezed while reuming after heaving read image “successfully”). Running update-initrd throwed some warnings regarding resume partioned would be ambiquos, naming a UUID not known to the system (any more). Some googling¹⁾ showed, that /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume might be involved - in my case, it contained the UUID mentioned by update-initrd.