Linux/Homelab

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.

PartitionLabelRole
1 GBEFIUEFI boot
120 GBDRACOGaruda OS (Plasma, apps, SSH)
~345 GBGNOMADexFAT 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 draco with SSH enabled
  • SMB mounts to gnomad-server over 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:

  1. Back up data to GNOMAD (/mnt/SSD1/Backups/)
  2. Run fsck, reinstall GRUB, or chroot into a broken Linux install
  3. 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.