Bootable vs Portable

[andygates]

Yesterday's overtime was made bearable by building and tweaking a bootable Ubuntu Linux setup on my shiny new 8Gb USB stick.  It was alternately straightforward and vexing: when I tried to be clever, it all went titsup; when I left it alone it was great - and I mean really great.  Example: "full visual effects" was a sumptuous bouncy delight out of the box, but when I updated the graphics drivers, it died.  Bah!  I broke it three times, the last one downloading "all system updates" and choking the reserved disk space; even deleting the junk left me with a crufty interrupted mess.

The lesson here is that there's more than one way to skin a snuffleupagus:  Ubuntu Live Peristent on a stick is not a full desktop install, kids, don't treat it like one - it's a demo CD with a memory.  Portable Linux looks like a much better way of doing it, this time it's a 'proper' install, no reserved faux diskspace to run out of while your phonebook wiki is tapdancing next door in a 4-Gb empty ballroom.

Question is, is a bootable stick anything more than a geek toy?  Most of my world is Windish - I'm only exposed to other stuff when I choose to be.  Perhaps just a big ol' encrypted bucket and a stack of portable apps is the way forward instead. 

Comments

[shifty-176.livejournal.com]

All I can suggest is that you head over to Pen drive Linux (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/) and have a look around there. 'Damn Small Linux' was based on Knoppix, more or less the first of the widely available 'live' systems. Pendrive has a page for a version here (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/all-in-one-usb-dsl/). Ubuntu is meant to be bells'n'whistles easy windows replacement, but I suspect you need something more customisable, and a lot smaller. Good hunting.