Linux distros for USB drive
 

Now USB drive is cheap.
I plan to buy a 8 GB USB drive and install linux on it, to be bootable one.
Can you suggest to me which linux distro supports USB drive very well, and easy to install?

All. Also depends on what you mean with easy to install, you can install any distro with its standard installer.

Ubuntu is a good bet as it tends to run 'out of the box' on most hardware! It's installer is also pretty good.

The bootloader is also installed in the flash drive?

Off course.

If you choose a live distro you don't even really need to install it, you just put it on the USB with unetbootin.

If you choose a live distro you don't even really need to install it, you just put it on the USB with unetbootin.

@qlue "Its installer"
@TobiSGD "Of course"
:)

I would recommend ubuntu. I am personally using ubuntu 10.10 on a 8GB usb stick. I have installed
metasploit, nmap, postgresql, wireshark, conky, gimp, vlc and nessus, on it !
It's fabulous.

BTW after you have done the customization of your installation, donot forget to backup the usb using a
dd command and create a image. You never know when you get an error on your usb and have to do a reinstall.
So just doing it from the image will be better
and easy.

bye
nishith

I made a 8GB CFcard+USB-Adapter with
- Knoppix 6.2 (the USB-Install menue of Knoppix started with CDROM, made automatically the FAT32 format and installed the syslinux)
- Slitaz 3.0
- PuppyLinux
- TinyCoreLinux
- PartedMagic
- I adapted the syslinux.cfg for start of all distros above (see the knoppix forum).
- etc.

Next time, I will try to make following:
- TinyCoreLinux start with CD
- install TinyCoreLinux on USB with ext3 format
- and see if knoppix 6.2 and others distros works fine
(I was informed FAT32 will be corrupted one time; not ext3).

Mint...

Mint and the other derivatives of Ubuntu have an easy to use installer for formatting and making a persistent USB flash drive installation from a live CD/DVD.

The Mint live-DVD has the advantage of having many media player programs already configured, and is what I used to make my 8GB USB. It even finds and configures mobile broadband service connections.

It depends. While the access time for single files is much faster on USB the transfer rate is significantly slower. So it depends on the distro.

I hope in the future we will have USB 3.0 flash drive which is 10 times faster.

Only on computers with USB 3.0 port, the flash drive alone is not sufficient.