Running Ubuntu from a Flash Drive

Here’s a really interesting idea courtesy of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet (”How to … install Ubuntu 8.04 on a USB flash drive“).  In the post he outlines the process of how you would go about preparing a USB flash drive to run Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

What this means is you’d have the ability to carry a portable operating system with you wherever you went.  All you’d need to use it is a physical computer to plug in to that would recognise the USB Flash drive and whose BIOS supported booting by USB devices.  Effectively you could then use any computer and yet still have immediate access to all your favourites, settings, and programs.

Furthermore, the increasing utility of suites of web applications like those provided by Zoho and Google (not to mention blogs and wikis) enable you to greatly reduce the storage demands of your system.  If most of your images, documents, spreadsheets, and other files were stored online there would be far less of a burden on your HDD.  So barring any unique file formats that required specialised software to run them you could theoretically house most of your information online and rely on the USB flash drive to provide you with access to your favourite programs.

In Adrian’s example the hardware requirements are a copy of the Hardy Heron ISO file (for installation) and a Flash Drive with minimimum of 4 GB space.

Unfortunately the drive I just got is 2 GB’s, so I can’t test this process.  If any of you feel curious and can get it working I’d love to hear your thoughts on things.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • I've a 4gb usb drive (~$40 from Dick Smith) that I have put a few different instances of Linux on. Pendrive linux, Ubuntu Gutsy and Mandrake something. There are different ways of doing it - one that does not require you to boot but does require you to run a process on the host which restricts you to using a Windows platform. It was slow on my PC at home, similar to running Ubuntu from the CD.
    I wonder how useful it really is considering that you can use gmail and google docks on most machines. You cant rock up to an internet caff and start rebooting their machines and running whatever OS you like put you can, outside of china at least, simply login to your gmail account. What would be useful tho' would be some sort of onion skin routing, like Tore that you could use to encrypt and anonymise your traffic.
  • Hi Steve,

    I'm with you. I don't know how realistic or useful running an OS off a flash drive really is. I just thought it was an interesting prospect worth exploring - if nothing else just for the tinkering potential.

    That said I do see two possible exceptions where this sort of solution might be warranted:

    a) The first would be the hardcore FSF type who won't touch proprietary software with a 10 foot pole. In this case they might prefer a slower computing experience to a proprietary one.

    b) The second might be someone who uses SSH a great deal and needs to have their key with them. Then again I don't know much about SSH, so there might be easier ways to login from public/borrowed computers.

    Aside from that, as you say, there's so much you can do online these days that you wouldn't even need a flash drive much of the time.

    For example, I store all of my bookmarks online, use Google Docs for files I need regular access to, store photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, use a blog for my journal thoughts, wikis for collaborative endeavors etcetera.

    Cheers,

    Mike
  • Todd Cole
    Using pen drive at this time works wonders to test new M/B
    and for access to repair a broken o/s and to show off ubuntu only down side is it does not save upgrades or downloaded programs each reboot is a fresh bare install but I can save files
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