AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
What can you do with a few gigabytes and a USB port? Quite a lot, with the right software. Learn how to encrypt your work, run whole systems, rescue Windows, and customize your thumb drive with these USB-geared tricks.
These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port.
"This week's release of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don't need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up."
It is well known that the so-called "solid-state disks" (SSD) have very low access times. I could have tried to buy an SSD, but being a tinkerer, I decided for another option. Thumb drives / flash drives / pen drives are also a kind of SSDs, one could say - but they have lousy transfer rates. In the end, I decided to create a software RAID using four 2GB USB drives.
"A couple days ago I mentioned WebRunner, the chrome-less browser from Mozilla that lets you run web applications like Gmail and others as if they were stand alone applications. They are still on-line, just in their own distraction free window. I thought it might be interesting to see if the functionality could be ported over to a portable USB thumb drive.
Want to run Linux any time, any place? Here's what to do with popular distributions like Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and Fedora, so you can boot up directly from your thumb drive.
Although Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu, Google has no intention right now of targeting the mass market. Instead, Chrome OS will be certified to run on specific hardware, which at the very least will need either an x86 or ARM CPU and a solid-state drive (SSD) for storage. Most SSDs are faster than hard drives, which enables Google to squeeze the boot time as low as possible.
Got a thumb USB drive or an SD card, and you'd like to put Linux on it? Did the other HOWTOs fail you? This is the real deal, through and through. This trick also works out-of-the-box with Kubuntu and other Ubuntu variants as well. Moreover, you can adapt it with very few changes to any other live CD Linux distributions out there.