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Make any PC your own with Linux on a USB key
It's easy to carry around useful files on a USB key, but it's even better to carry around a complete OS and set of apps, customised to just how want them. In this guide, Andrew Spode Miller shows how to install the tiny 25MB Slitaz Linux OS onto a USB key so that you can make any PC feel like your own.
Now that you can buy USB flash drives with capacities up to 32GB, you can practically carry your life around on your key chain. However, it’s one thing to have a collection of useful files, and quite another to have a complete OS and set of applications in your pocket, ready to turn any PC you find into your own truly personal machine. It’s perfectly possible, and in this article we’ll show you how to install a Linux distribution to a flash drive and use it to boot any computer for the ultimate in portability.
Almost every computer from the past few years supports booting from USB, and to do so it’s as simple as popping into the BIOS and changing the boot order, so that the machine prioritizes your USB drive instead of your hard drive. If you’ve ever set a machine up to boot from CDROM, the process is the same. It’s worth noting that some flash drives have odd hidden partitions which can make them setting them to boot from USB very troublesome. If you don’t mind the possibility of such setbacks, use whatever flash drive you can get your hands on; otherwise, buy a plain model with no clever software tricks – for the purposes of this article, we used a 16GB Corsair drive, which worked flawlessly.
STEP 1: CHOOSING A DISTRO
While 32GB flash drives are available, at around £100 they’re a significant investment – especially when 4GB models cost only £10 – this meant that when deciding which Linux distribution to use, we wanted to make it as lean as possible. That said, we still wanted an MP3 player, word processor and we browser available. The Linux distro we settled on was Slitaz, which is only a 25MB download so if you’re running on a modern PC, it can be loaded entirely into system memory. This means that once the PC has booted, the flash drive will only be accessed for documents and settings, making for a very fast, responsive computer. There are also other benefits to Slitaz; it looks sleek and minimalistic too, as it borrows themes from Gnome which are more commonly used by popular distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora.
Slitaz was designed primarily for PHP developers who need an entire web server ready to go, but for our purposes we can use its built-in package system to install what we need, and remove what we don’t. Slitaz supports most network and sound cards, but sometimes requires manually loading network drivers – hopefully this will be fixed in a future release. When I wrote the first draft of this article, I wrote quite a few scripts to automate some of the tasks; as a result, the article was long and quite confusing, but I submitted my changes to the development team and they’ve now been implemented in the first stable release (1.0) – one of the benefits of working with Open-Source software!
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followed your steps , except for downloading dos tools , the drive was already formatted , mounted the files on it , and everything went well , but booting thru Flash Drive does nothing , except for restarting windows XP frm the Hard Drive .
Comment by Rahim at 1:29am 22nd September 2008
hey, ive added this to a pen drive and virtual box, as its easyer to mess about on because im on wireless internet and cannot find the drivers. but i cant find away to edit the boot file so it always loads the same keybored layout, sound card ect.... can any1 help?
Comment by dannyboy1991 at 12:21am 22nd May 2008
hey, ive added this to a pen drive and virtual box, as its easyer to mess about on because im on wireless internet and cannot find the drivers. but i cant find away to edit the boot file so it always loads the same keybored layout, sound card ect.... can any1 help?
Comment by dannyboy1991 at 11:47pm 21st May 2008
Could the auther please do this for Ubuntu to see if it's feasible...from a lot of the tutorials on the net, there seems to be some errors!
Comment by gcd_638000846b0f at 4:54pm 8th May 2008
Could the auther please do this for Ubuntu to see if it's feasible...from a lot of the tutorials on the net, there seems to be some errors!
Comment by gcd_638000846b0f at 4:54pm 8th May 2008
Could you do this with Windows XP Pro? Would there be any performance increase running Windows from a flash drive?
Comment by gary_davies at 12:21am 1st May 2008
Thanks for this Sifter, this was my first ever use of Linux and it was a real eye opener. I plan to add open office to it and then use it whenever I am away from home. Big thanks...
Comment by NHill at 2:24pm 30th April 2008
Yipee, its working. I deleted partition, then created new fat32 before pressing apply. Before, I deleted, applied, new fat32, applied.
Comment by Cerberus_xiii at 1:53pm 25th April 2008
I had the same problem, Dont tell me youve got a SATA cd drive right? SliTaz doesnt mount sata cd drives so the easiest option is to try it on another pc with ata drives. If youve got a ata drive tho im stumped
Comment by TS__Slick at 11:28am 25th April 2008
One issue I had was when formating the USB key in Gparted, it's important to delete the partition already on it and create a new one (i.e. right click, delete partition, then right click and create a new one).
Comment by Sifter3000 at 10:19am 25th April 2008
I've just tried to do this. However when I get to tazusb gen-liveusb and then /dev/sda1 it says 'unable to mount cdrom or to find a filesystem on it (rootfs.gz)' The mem stick is formatted as FAT32, and set as boot in flags. Can't see why this doesn't work, any help?
Comment by Cerberus_xiii at 10:30pm 24th April 2008
steam runs under wine quite fine but only game I've tried is Day of Defeat source which also works quite well
Comment by conholster at 5:14pm 24th April 2008
Steam won't run natively - although I think it will via WINE. UT2004 is available in a Linux version, too...
Comment by Sifter3000 at 2:03pm 24th April 2008
random, since i'm new to linux (but not for long!)...but will apps like Steam run?
Comment by gcd_638000846b0f at 1:44pm 24th April 2008
Thank god for that, thought I was going mental. Thanks Sifter3000, lovely post btw, I know a lot of people are looking for this type of thing these days, Slitaz probably geting massive hits on theyre site too.
Comment by TS__Slick at 1:44pm 24th April 2008
I think once the boot starts up, you get to select the drive to install to, and that's where you select the USB pen drive
Comment by gcd_638000846b0f at 1:19pm 24th April 2008
I think once the boot starts up, you get to select the drive to install to, and that's where you select the USB pen drive
Comment by gcd_638000846b0f at 1:19pm 24th April 2008
CDburnerXP didn't ask for boot options when I loaded the iso this time.
Comment by Nemiro at 9:56pm 23rd April 2008
Make sure you use the "burn image" option, and finish/close the cd when writing it...
Comment by Sifter3000 at 9:24pm 23rd April 2008
I burned the image to a cd-rw, using CDburnerXP, but it won't boot from it. Bootable option in burner? If so, what settings? (I set CD to first boot device in bios already)
Comment by Nemiro at 9:14pm 23rd April 2008
my IT manager would flip if he saw this on my desktop :P
Comment by TBallS at 8:55pm 23rd April 2008
A perfect use for my old(er) 128mb USB stick. Hopefully I'll learn some stuff in the process!
Comment by Nemiro at 8:32pm 23rd April 2008
You're right. No idea where it went - it's in the original file, just not in the CMS - how bizarre! My apologies - now ammended.
Comment by Sifter3000 at 5:37pm 23rd April 2008
Hi Guys Is it me or is there a HUGE section missing about installing Slitaz onto the pen drive?
Comment by TS__Slick at 5:30pm 23rd April 2008
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