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84 Comments
- doiveo, on 01/02/2009, -6/+44An idea that will much much more practical if USB 3 ever gets off the ground. Still, I bet my mothers Vista laptop will run faster under USB Linux.
- MeatyMcBeef, on 01/02/2009, -2/+35Is this the new insult "faster than my mothers vista laptop?"
- yifanlu94, on 01/02/2009, -0/+25Been running linux on my flash drives for a while now, I believe the best site to learn how to do so is http://www.pendrivelinux.com/
- twiztidsinz, on 01/02/2009, -5/+25OMG HE HAS MORE THAN 5 SUBMISSIONS HES A POWERUSER WHOS GAMING TEH SYSTEMZ!!!!!
- UnlnvlslblE, on 01/02/2009, -0/+18I'd like to try running it off one of the new E-SATA flash drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 ... - Rememberthe0511, on 01/02/2009, -1/+16lol
- chris062689, on 01/02/2009, -0/+14Why don't people just use unetbootin?
It's basically the same thing, and also has a Windows version, so it makes it easier for other users to try Linux. - tattokris, on 01/02/2009, -0/+128.10 made this much easier, but pendrivelinux.com has had this covered for years.
- specialK16, on 01/03/2009, -0/+9I cannot even begin to understand what exactly he is trying say.
- random12345, on 01/03/2009, -2/+11There's your problem- its an HP.
- ThantiK, on 01/02/2009, -3/+12Great article, I plan on doing this myself soon but much differently. The problem with current USB2 flash drives is that linux writes back/forth a lot to the drive. A lot more than you might expect. It REALLY makes it painful trying to run everything from a USB drive. There are some things in the works that reduce the writeback linux makes to the drive but I seriously doubt it will be anything noteworthy until USB3 comes out. Puppy Linux currently would be your best option (I would assume) since it already just outright loads everything into memory and saves your data to a single flat-file
- lowtolerance, on 01/03/2009, -1/+10*wonders why some people don't just keep their thoughts to themselves*
- lowtolerance, on 01/03/2009, -1/+8buried for assuming your opinion reflects the opinion of the average digg user.
also, for the use of "fail" - iSinned, on 01/03/2009, -1/+7I find it ridiculous that you've been buried. In other stories, everyone complains about power users (a story about power users got over 20k diggs!), but when a power user submits a story, everyone goes to digg it and if you mention something about it, you get buried. Please make up your mind digg community.
- iignotus, on 01/03/2009, -0/+6This article is really poorly written, but yes running linux from a flash drive is nice.
- bjornski, on 01/03/2009, -1/+6Piss off, I'm a Vista user and don't normally read many of these articles UNLESS they wind up on Digg.
I rather enjoyed the article, it looks neat. I just bought an 8GB USB stick and have no current projects to take up my time.
So keep your elitism to yourself, it got me to read more about Linux. That's a GOOD thing, isn't it? - ublender, on 01/03/2009, -0/+5Wow, did you really just compare an overpriced laptop to a free operating system that runs on a flash drive that costs a couple bucks?
- TheBuzzKiller, on 01/03/2009, -0/+5There's all kinds of things you can change to minimize wear on the flash drive such as using certain file systems (like ext2), minimize swap usage (swapiness?), and a bunch of other stuff. Not that I'd be too worried about wearing out a $5 USB drive (what I use), just keep it backed up and transfer to a new drive when the capacity starts shrinking.
- tech10171968, on 01/03/2009, -0/+5Dugg, for being a Vista user with an open mind.
- lowtolerance, on 01/03/2009, -3/+7it's so true, though. I've got XP running through VirtualBox on my linux partition, and it runs laps around my vista setup on the same PC.
- Zephyr618, on 01/03/2009, -0/+4I guess linux users don't care about power users on digg....
- bjornski, on 01/03/2009, -0/+4Well, I'm a computer user.
Vista just happens to be the OS I prefer this year. - leamanc, on 01/03/2009, -0/+4Works fine for me on my two Dell laptops (Inspiron 1720 and an older one, I forget which...the first one to come with Ubuntu pre-installed from Dell), and also my Asus Eee PC.
- coldkill3r, on 01/03/2009, -0/+4dugg so people can see your stupidity.
- robby007, on 01/03/2009, -0/+3Ive recently tried this for mint 6, works perfectly and boots in under 2 minutes :D
but it will not work persistently. apparently i needed to copy a thing called Casper-rw but my pen dirve is not big enough.
its kind of a deal breaker, anyone know how to fix this? (make a smaller casper-rw?) - inactive, on 01/03/2009, -1/+4what if you pull it out while you're using it?
thats why I wouldn't do it.
sure, label me as some kind of retard who can't keep his USB stick inside the jack, but its a legit concern for me. what if it breaks off? - inactive, on 01/02/2009, -0/+3I done this with Fedora while I didn't have a hard drive, it's pretty amazing that I was able to save my stuff right back on to the memory stick, a huge advantage over a live linux disc. There was also another distro which could be run off dvd and save the files/options right back on to it, Puppy Linux. I went without a hard drive for weeks with this.
- Ghoztt, on 01/03/2009, -1/+4OH no, I can boot Knoppix and Ubuntu just fine on my HP. It's just yes - no USB boot on the HP.
Thanks for the advice, mictester. - Lemguy, on 01/03/2009, -0/+3Or maybe this was actually an ineresting article. Either that or maybe only power users cared about this comment and no1 else did.
- mongqui, on 01/03/2009, -0/+3Awesome for troubleshooting computers, specifically isolating hardware from software issues.
- skazzleprop, on 01/03/2009, -0/+3I spent three weeks just messing with the fedora usb install in my (non)-spare time, and I ended up reaching the same conclusion. My suspicion at the time was that it had to do with the compression, but I'm not well0versed enough to really know.
- MattBD, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2Most of these methods work like a Live CD, so the actual files on the flash drive are fixed.
- dAbReAkA, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2I tried Fedora 9, and later, Fedora 10 on a USB stick. The install is pretty quick and nice, and you can easily boot to your flash drive and use your system.
There was one drawback that i experienced several times though. Installing and updating applications, and working for more than 10 minutes somehow made the system unresponsive and nothing worked - meaning you click firefox, you see it down in the "taskbar" saying "Starting Firefox" and then it just exists. Everything was like that - you couldn't start anything new, or use your previously started apps.
When trying to shut down the system, it starts doing so and dies in the process, so you have to manually reset it.
What happens later is, your installation gets corrupted and you can't boot that live usb system anymore. I don't remember what the grub error message was however.
I'm interested if anyone else has experienced the same problem, or know a way to deal with it. - Azathothh, on 01/05/2009, -0/+2buy a PC
- MattBD, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2You might not be able to do that directly. What you could do is use the portable version of QEMU to set up a virtual disk image and install Vista to that, then put the disk image and QEMU on a flash drive. That way you could plug the flash drive into any computer and start the virtual machine so your Vista desktop could run on top of the host operating system.
However, I think Vista's system requirements might be too high, so you'd probably be better off with XP. - WoollyMittens, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2The macbooks also won't boot from a thumbdrive unless it's OS X. Very *****.
Does anyone know a way around this? - inactive, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2Use firewire?
- inactive, on 01/03/2009, -2/+4You poor HP users will have to use a boot floppy, then the USB stick!
- Raingwc, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2unetbootin is a miracle of a program, really awesome. Choose distro, choose media to install, and voila, done. Love it.
- diggnidy, on 01/03/2009, -1/+3*wonders why you don't just keep your thoughts to yourself*
- schleufer, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2I've booted Windows XP from a USB drive, but not Vista. I personally don't like Vista, but it could redeem itself if it became easy to boot from USB.
In the future, I think all operating systems should boot from a USB stick. - Smegzor, on 01/03/2009, -1/+3This comment blows
- inactive, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2For those not running a Linux distro:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ - raydeen, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2It's very cool, but test whether you can do updates or not. When I tried Fedora's USB install about 6 months ago or so, the update would bork the whole install. Tried it 3 times. Might just be the way data gets written to flash memory. I'd almost prefer a combo of Live CD and flash drive than just flash drive.
- MxM111, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2It is not basically the same thing, it IS the same thing. The article simply does not specify how to install it on USB drive... UNetbootin is the way to go...
- thcobbs, on 01/03/2009, -1/+3I created a non-live USB install of Gentoo. The live-versions have many draw-backs... and I think it would be extremely dangerous to have a single flat-file on a hot-pluggable device as your only means of permanent storage.
I got it down to around 750MB with Xserver and fluxbox. The cool part is that its more of a remote os than a full install. If you mount some specific directories when your plugged into your development host(or over NFS) then you can do all your standard portage updates, but they don't reside on your USB thumb drive. The kernel I chose was designed to be as generic as possible, so of course... you could likely get it down even more.
For the how to and some scripts:
http://huntercobbs.com/index.php?option=com_conten ...
I even decided to put up a sourceforge project that is linked from the site. - ScottyMcBaggs, on 01/04/2009, -0/+2I lawl'd. Obviously the demographic here largely resembles this guy:
http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/07/s ... - MattBD, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2That would be very cool indeed if you could have a customised USB stick OS that had all your settings saved so you could just slot it into any computer and get to work.
Now with more and more done in "the cloud", you don't have to worry about taking your email and IM contacts with you, so all you really need is an OS customised to your requirements. - MattBD, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2You can get 32GB ones, which I think would be big enough to handle Vista and a reasonable number of applications, but if you ran it in QEMU there's the issue of the additional system overhead from the host OS and from QEMU itself before you even allow for Vista. So you'd really need a powerful system to be able to run Vista from QEMU.
So XP would be much more viable, really. - thebloodvayne, on 01/03/2009, -0/+2Suddenly every Macbook fan on Digg is an expert on design...
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