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I have a laptop and a pc. My pc is very old having 1G Ram and old dual core processor but my laptop is relatively new.

I want to use 12.04 for laptop and 10.10 for my pc. Is there a way I can add two different versions of Ubuntu 12.04(64 bit) and 10.10 (32 bit) to my usb at the same time?

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    I would advice to try 12.04 on the old machine 1st. 12.04 does not require better hardware than 10.10 and it does include more security features and bugfixes over 10.10. 12.04 requires a minimum of 512 MiB RAM and a celeron or better. Twice the amount your old system has. Only things that might be an issue: videocard and hard disc. But I would still 1st try 12.04 @ankit
    – Rinzwind
    Aug 19, 2012 at 8:42

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Depends on the drive. some flash drives can be partitioned others cant. I have installed grub to flashdrives with no issues before, a usb hdd is no problem at all to do that with. you can either make grub boot to a cd iso or boot to a full blown live distro on a flash/hdd.

It may be possible to make a virtual root disk image to boot to like a vmware vhd file but that would take a bit of work from what I read, if its even possible.

If you boot from cd image that file will be copied to memory so you would need a couple gb of ram. if the laptop has 2gb and the desktop 1. you could make the usb drive 10.x for the desktop and use the cd image to boot the laptop if you cant partition it.

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Just one word - YUMI.

And another - MULTIBOOT.

Personally, I prefer YUMI.

PS - You can run Ubuntu 12.04 on your desktop too. And YUMI and MULTIBOOT are available only on Windows.

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It's possible to do this through grub2 - either booting into different partitions or simply booting the ISO file directly. It's also possible if you have a large enough USB drive to partition it and do a full install of both operating systems on it. If you do a search you'll find a lot of information about these things.

Unless you want to do these as a learning exercise however I'd suggest the easiest thing to do would be to use MultiSystem to configure your USB drive with as many operating systems (and types) as you wish. Go here: http://liveusb.info/multisystem/ and download the installer file install-depot-multisystem.sh.tar.bz2

You will then need to unpack and install the program, then run it to build your USB drive. You don't need to download the ISO files again - multisystem just defaults to that mode of operation. Pay attention to creating a persistence file since it boots from a virtual disk. It's not difficult as everything is automated for you.

MultiSystem also works for the Gparted LiveUSB and other recovery tools so it's great to build a complete recovery USB drive with, especially those that aren't designed to boot straight from the ISO (like the Gparted CD).

You do however lose the first test and repair menu of the LiveUSB's, since multisystem causes it boot straight into the operating system. You can certainly add these tools back into the grub2 menu that multisystem creates however.

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  • thanks, i made a usb with "Multi-System" and 12.04(64bit) and 10.10(32 bit) but while i'm trying to access 10.10 I'm getting some initram busy box error while accessing 12.04 on the disk gives no option to install but the pc just boots up with live cd.
    – Ankit
    Aug 19, 2012 at 14:13

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