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My goal is to do a standard installation of Ubuntu on a flash drive. I have 32 GB and 64G B sticks available so I am not concerned about space issues. My concern is that most "live" distros have far better hardware detection that is run during boot time that I would lose with a full installation.

I want this installation to be as "universally" compatible as possible with whatever hardware I encounter. I'm assuming something needs to change from the standard install and I'm also guessing I'll need to pull down a lot of drivers too, but I am unsure how to do this.

Is there a way to configure a standard Ubuntu install to run the hardware detection at boot time similar to how a live distro does this?

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I've run similar installations on a very wide variety of hardware without difficulty. Unlike Windows, the vast majority of hardware you'll encounter is already has "baked in" support in the kernel. While I don't usually get maximum resolution out of video cards/displays (as this often requires proprietary drivers), I've always ended up with a usable system regardless of the hardware I've thrown at it. I use installations such as this for troubleshooting, testing, cloning drives and making images, data recovery and etc. For my purposes this approach has worked fine. Your use case may require a different approach, but I doubt it. You may find this helpful once you've decided to take the plunge. Supported hardware is a moving target as new hardware support is added regularly, this is old, but still interesting: https://www.linux.com/news/hardware/drivers/8203-is-my-hardware-linux-compatible-find-out-here

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  • Good to know. I guess I'll just do the install this weekend and see how it goes.
    – user3246693
    Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 18:52
  • If my solution works for you, please upvote and/or accept it by clicking the check mark so that others with the same question can find a verified answer. I thank you and the community thanks you.
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 18:55

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