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.

* You will need to run the ‘Taz USB Writefs’ command when you install new programs - this will make these new installations permanent on your USB stick. All your documents and settings will be written to your home folder. If anything should go wrong when writing your filesystem, you can rollback to your previous filesystem by typing ‘previous’ at the ‘boot:’ prompt when starting the machine up.

* The next step is to add some useful software to Slitaz. Type in ‘tazpkg get-install packagename’ to install software, and grab gimp, abiword, pidgin and gnutls. If you’re asked whether to install missing dependencies, answer yes. This process will give you a range of software: Gimp for photo editing, Pidgin as an MSN/IRC/AOL/ICQ client and Abiword as a word processor. For playing MP3s, we already have Alsaplayer, and FireFox for browsing the web. After removing unnecessary software and adding in some apps I needed, I was left with a 29.9MB OS.

STEP 7: MAKING IT ALL PERMANENT
* The final stage is to make these changes permanent, so close all the programs, right click the desktop and under ‘Slitaz Live’ click ‘TazUSB Writefs (lzma).’ This will take the current memory resident filesystem, compress it, and automatically put it onto your flash drive. When it is finished, reboot the machine by right clicking the desktop and finding ‘Reboot’ under ‘System Actions.’

You’ve now got a complete Linux OS and set of core applications on a memory key, so any PC you sit down at and connect to will now be as familiar as your home rig.