Besides Puppy or DSL, is there a full "regular" Linux distro that is friendly to be installed on a USB flash drive that won't wear it out? I want to be able to upgrade it, not just keep minor persistent changes like the methods outlined in pendrivelinux.com. The loopback file would fill out too much if I actually did a apt-get update, so I want something that installs natively on a USB flash drive with EXT3/EXT4, etc. However, is there a distro that sends the log to a tmp ram drive, for instance? Something made *not* to wear out a USB drive too fast?

I want a truly portable Linux on a UFD, not a semi-attempt that uses casper.

Thanks,
Robert

Hi Robert, I've had good luck with SliTaz on a pen drive. Their 'TazUSB' utility is brilliant.

Thanks, I'll check into that.

It doesn't have to be a lightweight distro though. I was hoping somebody had forked Ubuntu or Fedora into something that runs mostly from RAM, except when to make upgrades, installs and changes to the drive.

In Debian there is the live-sn (live-snapshot) option
see the bottom here
http://live.debian.net/manual/html/persistence.html

I dont know how this affects it

I looked at the TazUSB utility and it didnt look like it did what I wanted.

Any other suggestions for a USB friendly distribution? This would be something that supports EXT2 natively on the flash with things like /var/log dumped into a RAM drive, and no swapfile needed. Or even something that runs from RAM, but writes to disk on shutdown. I can't be the first person who has thought of his, but unfortunately I lack the technical know-how to write my own distribution for this purpose.

Loopback/casper files don't allow for full upgradability and would overflow on an apt-get update.