UNetbootin allows you to easily adapt a Linux CD image to boot off of a USB flash drive or memory card. Have a system without a CD drive? Create a bootable USB drive to run your Linux installer.

Readyboost for Vista is a feature added to the OS where you can encourage your limping Vista install to jog a bit faster by essentially using a smallish USB drive as disk cache.  There’s also some Vista Voodoo with Superfetch going on there. While Ubuntu (the distro that I use) and other distros don’t really use Superfetch, you can still get an advantage using the disk cache functionality - particularly if you’re running on a system that doesn’t have a ton of RAM available.

Last week, on the new MacHaxor site, I explained how to create an encrypted disk image on a mac, but there are similar tools available for Linux. TrueCrypt allows you to make all kinds of encrypted containers, but one of the most interesting is a hidden partition.

USB flash drives are really cheap these days, so I decided to create a portable environment that contains all my favorite applications, as well as Java IDEs and utilities. This is attractive since I can boot up any computer with this thumb drive, and have the same environment to work with. Besides, it is kind of cool.

I just found the easiest way to create Ubuntu 8.04 live usb flash disk, thanks to this nice tool: http://klik.atekon.de/liveusb/

I was reading How to install Ubuntu Linux from USB Stick posted on this site a while ago, and found it to be quite some work to get Ubuntu working on a USB stick. Besides, having to prepare your USB device, creating a separate partition on it which will be more or less “useless” after the installation, giving up 750MB of space? There had to be a better way.

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.

USB Ubuntu 8.04 Persistent install tutorial for current Windows users. This tutorial covers the process of installing Ubuntu Hardy Heron to a USB flash drive using the Live CD to create the partitions and a Windows host to perform the build. Ubuntu will uses the persistence feature to save and restore changes back to the flash drive. Hence your changes and settings can be saved and restored upon subsequent boots.

After installing VMware Server on Hardy heron, if you find that your virtual machine cannot detect any USB devices on the host, that is because Ubuntu has removed the support for /proc/bus/usb/*. The following is the way to solve this issue:

This tutorial describes how to install Ubuntu by copying the contents of the installation CD to an USB memory stick (aka flash drive) and making the stick bootable. This is handy for machines like ultra portable notebooks that do not have a CD drive but can boot from USB media.

Silly me. After reading about syslinux it suddenly dawned on me I was still making it too hard to transfer Ubuntu 7.10 LiveCD from CD to thumb drive. The key difference is copying all the files in the isolinux directory on the Ubuntu LiveCD to the root of the thumb drive, and renaming isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg. So here are simpler instructions for creating a bootable Ubuntu Live Thumb Drive under Linux.

After some thinking and further reading on the net, I finally figured out a fairly simple way create a bootable Ubuntu 7.10 LiveUSB stick. And all under Linux. Here are the simple details I came up with to set up and configure a very minimal Ubuntu 7.10 Live USB thumb drive.

It is quite simple to set up encrypted volumes using truecrypt. If you mount the encrypted disks at boot time, then an annoyance is having truecrypt prompt for password or path to key for each disk. You can specify these things on the command line while mounting the encrypted volumes, but for a very large reasons that is not a clever approach.

This tutorial will show how-to install Ubuntu on a usb stick. Even though this tutorial uses Ubuntu as its base distribution, you could virtually use any type of Linux liveCD distribution.

This tutorial explains how to install, boot and run Ubuntu 7.04 from a USB flash thumb drive using Windows, the Ubuntu Linux CD and a new custom FIXED initrd.gz to correct the persistent feature that was previously broken with the original 7.04 release. Upon completion of this tutorial, the user will be able to save changes and settings back to the flash drive making for a completely Portable Ubuntu version 7.04. Now you can take your Feisty Fawn with you!