Hi I am a nerd, and i want to carry a linux distro with me around my school in my pocket everywhere i go so that i may enjoy the amazing experience that is linux everywhere i go (+ i now h8 using windows)

Anyway I have tried many options and so far no success so I wondered if anyone had any fresh ideas on how this could be done please post as many ideas as you possibly can.

I imagine lots of people have done this

I installed slax onto a usb stick. It worked for a while then stopped and I haven't been bothered to fix it.

Problem is, most PCs bios won't be set up to boot to usb, so you either have to edit the bios settings (maybe a bit dodgy if it's not your pc), or use a live-cd instead. For live cds, I recommend knoppix. And if that's not pocket-sized enough, slax make a small live-cd, for small cds, they've even got one for credit-card cd format. Would that be nerdy enough?

You could have a live-cd with all your stuff installed on a usb stick, then write a startup script (and build into cd-image) that searched for your usb stick, then mounted it. That would be pretty nerdy too.

The slax site has some interesting info on this stuff.
http://slax.linux-live.org/

The old fashioned way is to install grub on a floppy, which would let you boot to pretty-much anything, because almost every bios will try the floppy before the hard-drive (some won't go for the cd-rom).

K, i tried some of that i put slax on my external HDD and it came up with " Kernel panic:unable to mount root fs "

Can anybody help me solve this problem i think it's got something to do with the fact that I'm trying to load the FS of a USBDrive but i think i might need a special kernel or xinitrd to do this can anybody help me find the right on i tried a scsi kernel but that didn't seem to work

PLEASE can anybody help me, this is my only answer short of bringing my PC to school, and I would get beaten up for that and the PC would get stolen

I found the following:
at
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/...hp/t-5151.html
So this was talking about making your initrd image for booting from the usb. So you'd need to make another initrd image. I've had initrd troubles before and solved them by simply leaving the initrd out of the boot process. But I'm not sure what the ramifications of this are.

This might be old, but maybe it still applies.
This might explain why my usb install suddenly started to fail for no reason as well.

It may be the drive itself, they dont last forever

Well maybe, but this one had only done about 4 boots, and almost no work otherwise. Are they that flimsy?

I've found a really easy way to get the most out of linux on a portable hdd you can install suse off the dvd then, boot of the dvd using the 'boot installed system' util, but make sure the system your installing on and the system your going to be using SUSE on have the same device reference e.g. if the system your installing it on see's your linux partition as /dev/sda2 the system you will use it on must see it as that too.

I now have a full SUSE system running smoothly @ school, and can fit nearly all the files i have @ home on the 250gb one i use at school, the next steps i'll do is to make a kernel patch and install grub so that i can boot straigjt off the HDD and use the kernel of the HDD