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I need easily updatable troubleshooting LiveUSB distro. By troubleshooting I mean that it should not have nothing fancy (X is used o display gparted etc.) but should have access to file archivers/undeleting etc. tools.

Unfortunately most LiveUSB distros are modified LiveCD ones so they assume sequential and slow base device (as opposed to USB flash disk which is fast compared to CD, have 0 latency and have much number of writes to it). The only method of updating is overwriting the previous content.

I'd like to have 'easy' package manager on distro to allow installing tools I need and from time to time an update which would not destroy any customisation. On the other hand I still would like to have autodetection scripts etc.

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Please do not post LiveCD-based distributions that can be used on usb like SysResCD. – Maciej Piechotka Jan 1 '11 at 16:20
Can you explain what you mean by ...most LiveUSB distros are modified LiveCD ones so they assume sequential and slow base device.... – Tshepang Jan 18 '11 at 15:55
You could adapt the backtrack install to hard drive directions to most linux distros – Call me V Jan 28 '11 at 11:21

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why not just install a light-weight distro directly onto a USB stick? My solution to this problem is to have a normal install of Crunchbang #! on my USB key, which I can update, tweak, install extra tools, personal scripts etc. to, and so on. Works a treat! You could use any distro you fancy, of course. Crunchbang is a good choice, but you'll probably have your own preferences.

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Because at least in the past distributions autoconfigured themselves in accordance to hardware - install only needed X11 driver, create /etc/fstab etc. It is not the case with live usb when you want to have some scripts that autoconfigure hardware at each boot. – Maciej Piechotka Mar 8 '11 at 23:19
X11 autoconfigures in modern versions, and while fstab does not, it's not a big obstacle. To be honest, the most trouble I've gone to with my crunchbang usb stick is to write a script which writes my .conkyrc on the fly to reflect different hardware configurations. – simon Mar 9 '11 at 2:05

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