I have bought a 4 GB USB flash memory and I want to have linux on it. I have been running Gentoo for some years but I will need a temp folder when I compile applications and that temp folder would be many GB big, so Gentoo is not an option for my 4 GB memory stick. I need a distribution that is using binaries. I have run Ubuntu before, but what about Xubuntu? Would that be a better choice?

Or should I use another one?

If you are going to run a distro on a flash drive, you want to choose a distro that has been designed to do so, mostly because you don't want your flash drive having a swap file being writen to 1000's of times a day. It would ruin your flash drive pretty quick. You want something like DSL or Puppy Linux.

They wouldn't take up more than 100Mb vs 2 gigs+ even for Xubuntu, so you would still have space for your data/apps.

Best of luck...

David

Thanks!

So you think Xubuntu would work well? Isn´t it using a swap file?

I don't think Xubuntu would work well on a bootable flash drive, unless someone had modified it to not write to swap very often, specifically for this type of use. I haven't run across that yet. Xubuntu might not be a very good distro for that type of use, as it is only lightweight compared to a distro that uses KDE or Gnome as it's default desktop.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.puppylinux.org/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/
http://www.flashlinux.org.uk/
http://knopperdisk.knopper.tk/

All of these distro's are designed to be used on a pen-drive. Let me know if any of these helped.

Best of luck...

David

Thanks a lot!

So a USB version is like a live-CD? So the idea of using linux on USB is not to format the USB pen with ext3 or something similar and use it as a harddrive?

But is it still possible to save files and condigurations on the USB, so I don´t need to reconfigure the system each time I boot linux from USB?

Is it possible to upgrade the kernel on USB versions of linux?


I have now tested DSL but it has not support for my network card, so I will test something else.

Yes, linux can be installed to a usb flash drive, and it works like a live cd version, but you can write back to the flash drive, it isn't read only, so you can save your own files and install new software, it's very similar to a regular hard drive installed distro, but lower power consumption, but you need to install a distro that doesn't write to swap very often, or at all really, if you can. There are live cd distro's that can write back to the cd that they booted from, so it isn't just read only. Puppy linux can do it, and probably a bunch of others I haven't heard of. Knoppix(from the cd) can write to your usb flash drive, to save settings, and use it as a /home.

The only fly in the ointment would be that your bios has to support booting from usb. Most new boards already do, most older motherboards don't. Quite a few anyway. If your bios doesn't support booting from usb, you can always set it up so the bios boots to your cd-rom drive, or floppy drive, which then can chain load your usb flash drive distro.

You can store other files on the usb drive usually, but anything on the drive gets written over when you install linux on the drive. You'll want to check the docs on any distro you choose to use, to make sure this is true of whatever distro you go with.

You can update the kernel, or install new software. You can also unplug it from your pc, and just put it in any other computer, and if the bios supports booting from usb, there all your software and settings are, ready to use.

I assume these could also be used on an external USB hard drive too then?

Thanks

Yes they can, as long as your bios supports booting from usb. Most newer motherboard bios's do. You wouldn't need one of these specialised distro's to use on a usb external hard drive though, any linux distro would do just as well, with the external hard drive, how often you write to swap wouldn't be an issue, as any ordinary hard drive (magnetic rather than flash based) would be able to handle it just fine.

Best of luck....

David

Thanks David,

I tried with SuSE 9.3 last year but without success, which is why this thread caught my eye.

I'll try a different distro and see what happens