Ever wanted access to your own email, bookmarks, or applications?
Perhaps you want a persistant operating system on a USB flash drive... this is part one of an experiment I am doing. Step one for me is to decide on a build of Linux to run from flash memory. Step two is to try an put that into practice on the USB storage of the HTC Desire Android phone.
Problem with the Android phone is the USB storage doen't seem to wake up fast enough for the boot loader on my laptop to pick it up. I'll work on that later...
For now, I want to practice setting up a build. I have a 4GB SanDisk Cruiser Blade flash drive I picked up for about $7 from Office Works. It's small and light and should suit the key ring fine.
Next thing to do is find a suitable distro... there are loads of them around, some lighter than others. I want a loaded distro that will be nice to use and have access to plenty of utilities, and lots of support. So we're talking about an Ubuntu 10.04 based distro then? But what about the small 4GB drive? Ubuntu has a recommended minimum drive size of 5GB. Xfce based Xubuntu and LXDE Lubuntu are pretty light, but the standard Xubuntu still has a minimum 4.4GB drive requirement, although the alternative install ISO requires just 2GB. Lubuntu is lighter than Xubuntu, but the 10.04 release is NOT LTS, so it doesn't meet my requirement for support.
The Xubuntu Alternate is not a Casper-based Live bootable Linux image. So no go there.
I decided on Xubuntu 10.04 LTS.
I decided on Xubuntu 10.04 LTS.
But how are we going to install it to the USB flash drive? You could use the standard USB image writer to give you a live image, but that's balls. You could also use the Portable Linux 0.9,4 package from rudd-o.com, but that didn't work for me.
I chose to use the live cd installer, and simply selected the flash drive as my root partition. I didn't partition it for swap, since flash transfer speeds would be slower than any RAM deficiency I can foresee. The build went pretty slow, but it works. Size on disk is a little over 2GB. I'm sure there are ways to reduce the build size, but that's a pretty full-feature install and cost about $7.
I chose to use the live cd installer, and simply selected the flash drive as my root partition. I didn't partition it for swap, since flash transfer speeds would be slower than any RAM deficiency I can foresee. The build went pretty slow, but it works. Size on disk is a little over 2GB. I'm sure there are ways to reduce the build size, but that's a pretty full-feature install and cost about $7.
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