DRACO: A Bootable Garuda Stick That Is Home Away From Home
120 GB Garuda OS plus exFAT GNOMAD storage — Tailscale SSH, preloaded dev tools, and a rescue playbook for fixing broken PCs.
- garuda
- portable
- tailscale
- homelab
Why I wanted a stick, not just a backup
I run a multi-machine swarm — Ryzen desktop, NAS, MSI worker, Mac controller — but I still needed something I could plug into any PC and feel at home. Not a live USB that forgets everything. A real environment with my agents, SSH keys, and tools already there.
DRACO is that stick: Garuda Linux on a Crucial 500 GB SSD split three ways.
| Partition | Label | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | EFI | UEFI boot |
| 120 GB | DRACO | Garuda OS (Plasma, apps, SSH) |
| ~345 GB | GNOMAD | exFAT files — visible on Windows/Mac without booting |
What ships on DRACO
Preinstalled and configured (AI-assisted, human-verified):
- Cursor, Antigravity 2 (
agy), Kun GUI, Gnomad Slate - Tailscale auto-join as hostname
dracowith SSH enabled - SMB mounts to
gnomad-serverover the mesh - Agent welcome packet at
~/.gnomad-brain/so Cursor knows the swarm on first open - Rescue tools: GParted, TestDisk,
nvme-cli, filesystem repair stack
GNOMAD holds portable files — ORGANIZATION workspace copy, backups from rescued machines, transfer shuttle.
Rescue mode, not just dev mode
The same stick boots Garuda on a broken laptop so I can:
- Back up data to GNOMAD (
/mnt/SSD1/Backups/) - Run
fsck, reinstall GRUB, or chroot into a broken Linux install - Use GParted without touching the wrong disk
When plugged into a running OS without booting, only GNOMAD appears as normal storage. The Garuda partitions look like unknown — don’t format them.
What I’d do differently
I’d sync ORGANIZATION to GNOMAD before the first trip. Agents need .cursorrules locally when cloud tokens are tight:
rsync -avz gnomad-server:/mnt/SteamDrive/ORGANIZATION/ /mnt/SSD1/ORGANIZATION/Next step: USB-C enclosure so DRACO leaves the internal SATA bay and actually travels.