OK
lots of people wondering
Hey, I wanna run Linux from my flashdrive
and I want to have these benefits, not
available on livecd

1) persistence, frugality, nomadic
Mweaning settings, apps installed, etc are persistent

Frugal meaning it boots from a pristine read-only
filesystem and changes are written back to a read-write "file"
or partition. "file" could be casper-rw, backup.tar.gz, pup_save, etc

Nomadic meaning they can live on cd, usb or hd
even within another OS's filesystem(puppy, tinycore, etc)

2)the speed of the faster usb

3) the frugal system is "expendable", meaning if you break something, etc
you just erase the storage "file" and start over.

4) the distro's will not interfere with your windows hd install
as most boot into ram or stay mounted to usb.

any other good pointers?

Anyway, here's the best new frugal distro's for usb's
either ext3 or fat32
I have tested all of these on both my fat32 and ext3 usb's
both Kingston Data-Travelers, a 2gb and a 4gb.
NOTE-distro's will run faster on a ext3 usb

1) Sidux-2009-02-xfce "Debian Hot&Spicy"
Simply awesome, huge user manual and wiki
remasterable, just awesome
I suggest using the "fromiso" and "persist" boot options
Best debian I ever saw":
http://sidux.com/

2) Fedora 11 lxde edition
awesome and not listed at Fedora!
runs much faster than kde or gnome fed11 livecd
runs on both ext3 and fat32 usb
http://www.compatdb.org/support/topi..._remix_11.html

3) Tinycore 2.2rc2
smallest linux with fully functional desktop(s)
can be a server, appliance, etc
runs completely in ram
you know dsl?
tinycore is dsl, as dsl is dead
and tinycore founder was the head of dsl MyDSL dev
http://www.tinycorelinux.com/

4)Browserpuppy49 & Webserverpuppy49
another awesome distro, puppy
these are both puppy 412 remasters
and boy do they run quick
http://www.browserpuppy.com/
both have flash10 pre-installed too

5) Netbootcd-3.1.1
MUST BE HAND INSTALLED TO USB(EASY)
or use Unetbootin
based on microcore/tinycore
can net-install any distro
only requires 48mb of ram to go!
http://netbootcd.tuxfamily.org/

6) Austrumi 1.9.3
nice
http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruuni/

7) CDLinuxOS
http://www.cdlinux.info/wiki/doku.php/about

In my book slax is the best linux live system
http://www.slax.org/
slax is based on slackware (my favorite distro) and
has a modular approach: you can extend it easily by
placing modules (that you can download or build yourself)
in a certain subfolder.
It can be run from a cdrom or a usb stick.
It can coexist with other distros in the same key
thanks to the syslinux menu

then, depending on your needs,

grml (debian-based, mostly console based)
http://grml.org/

RIPlinux (RecoveryIsPossible)
http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-r...looplinux/rip/

partedmagic (I successfully used its gparted to shrink and
move my vista partitions to make room for linux)
http://partedmagic.com/

tinycore is fast indeed. But it's useless for me. As my
wireless card is not detected
and it relies on the network to install more
tools it's harder to figure out how to add stuff

OK let's add to this list

http://mandalka.name/privatix/index.html.en
nice security, debian based usb distro

and for penetration testing, stuff like that
Samuarai Ubuntu
http://samurai.inguardians.com/
user name is samurai
password is samurai