LinuxQuestions.org - Wanting a decent distro booting off a 1gb pen drive.

I'm lucky enough to have gotten a 1gb pen drive through work, and i want a bootable Linux distro on it. No particular reason, except that it'd be cool, handy and i might learn a bit while i'm at it.

The main thing i'm mulling over at the moment is whether or not to use a live distro, or try to install a proper distro on there, if it's possible; at least that way i won't have any problems with the settings not saving, or something similar. I'm a bit worried though, that most distros won't let me even try to install it to the pen drive.

Given the choice, i'd like to have a debian-based system; maybe Ubuntu, or Knoppix, suggestions are welcome. In the case of a liveCD; I prefer Gnome to KDE, but both are good so it doesn't really bother me. I'd like to put fluxbox and/or xfce on there as an option too if it's possible, in case i get this thing going on a lesser system.

So in short, i basically just want to know where to start; i've got Damn Small Linux booting off a 64mb drive, but that has an installer of sorts, so i'm still pretty in the dark about how to do this. I'd love to get Ubuntu working on this thing, but i have my doubts that it's possible for someone as uneducated as myself.

Thanks a Bundle.