Hardware requirements

1. a USB removable, writable disk

➤ USB revision: the fastest supported by the host computer(s) you will most commonly use:

  • USB 3.1 — if your computer is very new (otherwise the 3.1 drives are sometimes not recognised on earlier USB ports built for the 3.0 standard)
  • USB 3.0 — otherwise (since the speed improvement will be huge vs. USB 2.0, and the USB protocol will always fail back to 2.0 if a much older machine doesn't support 3.0)

USB 2.0 memory sticks, including absurdly obsolete configurations (e.g. HD SATA drives with a USB cable) will also work with Frankenwallet... though in these cases you should be patient enough for a 1-2 minute fsck on every boot.

Note not all drives with the same USB revision have the same real-world speeds.  If you have the option of choosing your memory stick for a fast Frankenwallet, I recommend going to USB UserBenchmark to look for the highest possible read/write bandwidth.

➤ Size of drive:

32 GB is generally enough for either Cardano operations or simply to host the Cardano node wallet Daedalus, based on the following space estimates:

  • 8+ GB for a sparse Ubuntu desktop partition
  • 12+ GB for:
    • (either) build space for GHC (the Haskell compiler) and the Cardano CLI, plus all required downloads and libraries, with plenty of room for growth
    • (or) the current (growing) size of a synced Daedalus node
  • plenty of room leftover for:
    • other blockchain software and toolkits
    • other encrypted backups you want to keep securely on the Frankenwallet.
  • If not running a wallet and building the Cardano node elsewhere then 16 GB would suffice.

A 1 TB external SSD drive (generally faster than a memory stick that size) would be needed for Ethereum tools requiring a synced Ethereum node.  (Note this size figure is based on informal talk with Ethereum devs rather than testing with a live Frankenwallet.)

We hope to provide estimates for other blockchain environments as soon as we can test them: in the meantime you are welcome to make suggestions here.

➤ a second memory stick: used once in the installation. Note this is not essential (since you can install from optical media, TFTP boot server, etc.) but most people will want to use one.  Only 8GB capacity is needed, and the slowest ones on the market will be fine for this purpose.

2. a Windows PC to attach it to

➤ If you have a made-for Windows PC — whether it runs Windows, Linux or both — you can skip to the next section. 😎

What if I have a Mac?

At the time of this writing we don't have enough Apple machines available locally to test whether the boot software on an Apple desktop or laptop will recognise a bootable Linux partition (either legacy / GRUB or UEFI) on any removable media without specially formatting it with a tool like Etcher.

  • Etcher may work very well for the installation media itself, but the Frankenwallet is not just bootable… it is persistent — with a live, modifiable file system — as well as created dynamically. 
  • So we know of no way that a boot disk creation tool like Etcher, designed to work on fixed ISO images, could ever make the Frankenwallet bootable after its creation through the Ubuntu installation process.

Again, we hope Apple Mac users interested in the Frankenwallet will find some approaches to this problem and report on their learning experiences here.  In the meantime we hope the following links will provide some good starting points:

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