Make any PC your own with Linux on a USB key

Posted at: Wednesday 23rd April 2008 by Andrew Spode Miller

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!