A wild configuration - Domino on Ubuntu Deskop 26.04 live USB stick boot with persistent mode
Daniel Nashed – 20 January 2026 00:41:22
This evening I have been playing this with the Ubuntu Dekstop live ISO booted from USB and tried to see how far I can get.
This was a learning experience about the components involved. But some of it for sure will get refined over time.
The special part of this is that this is a booted from USB environment. Not a USB drive that is used to automatically install Ubuntu on a machine.
I have played with auto installing Ubuntu via USB earlier. But this is a different scenario.
The notebook is untouched. And yes all the standard Linux desktop functionality works as well.
Like using the browser to access a local or remote server via HCL Nomad.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) Beta
To see how stable it already is, I downloaded the latest ISO for Ubuntu 26.04 and copied it to a USB stick using RUFUS.
The official released version would be 24.04 LTS.
https://releases.ubuntu.com/26.04-snapshot1/
Ubuntu Desktop Live ISO
I first looked into how I can boot the live Desktop variant on my Thinkpad.
Without any modification the current beta of the ISO downloaed (5.3 GB) worked like a charm.
Ubuntu Persistent data mode
But that does not persist any data. So I told RUFUS to keep 200 GB of my 256 GB USB stick for data. That's a simple change when writing the ISO by specifying the preserve space.
Booting with a persistent data location I get a /cow volume of 200 GB assigned after booting the Ubuntu from USB stick. All changes are going into the copy on write file-system automatically.
When I reboot all my data is still available!
Running Docker
I had to try out if I can get Docker working. I could download images, but I could not start them.
Docker will not work because it can't use the file-system.
The file-system is already virtual. And Docker uses a similar mechanism.
I could have reserved extra space on the USB stick.
Instead I could have added another USB stick or drive.
But I came up with another wild idea because I did not want to redo my USB stick and I did not want to add another one ...
Trick: Leverage /dev/shm
My notebook has 32GB of RAM. By default half of the memory is available as a tempfs at /dev/shm.
Max 16 GB memory is fine for the images and volumes for a small Domino test server.
I pointed Dock and containerd to sub directories in /dev/shm for it's data.
Yes the data will be gone when I reboot. But it is pretty fast. All Docker I/O is in RAM :-)
It's just for testing and I can download the base images and build the container image when I reboot my machine.
Instead of using a Docker volume I pointer my Docker container to /dev/shm/local as well.
The result was a freaking fast Domino server. Once the data was cached, catalog.nsf was updated in a second.
Domino Backup also completed in a second as soon the data was cached.
Conclusion / What to learn from it
This was a pretty fun experience. And there is a lot to learn from it about the individual components. The setup is really quick once you know what to do. Because a lot of it is in RAM it is pretty fast.
No I would probably use this for a Docker workshop probably. But it would be possible to just give out prepared USB sticks if a notebook is allowed to be booted with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu comes with the right signatures to be booted on a Windows 11 machine without any issues. No modification to secure boot is needed (and it would be a disaster if you change it, because you would break your Windows 11).
Pointing Docker and containerd to /dev/shm was a wild trick. But everything else was really out of the box and would just work with adding persistent space to a USB stick using RUFUS.
References and further reading
On Windows RUFUS is really the tool of choice. If you already have a Ubuntu machine, there are also other options.
https://documentation.ubuntu.com/desktop/en/latest/how-to/create-a-bootable-usb-stick
The documentation also mentions RUFUS on Windows. But there is no persistence explained in this tutorial.
But that's pretty simple. You just need to slide the space that should be reserved on the RUFUS menu to provide some space.
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