What the word needs… A LiveCD with homedir-on-flash-drive
by Vinay Gupta • January 5, 2008 • Everything Else • 4 Comments
1> Boot from the DVD on any computer.
2> Plug in your flash drive.
3> Compute, including saving documents.
4> There’s your simple computing environment for, well, pretty much anywhere. For bonus points, make general software installable to the keychain drive.
Why doesn’t this exist?
It *does* exist, no?
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org is just one example.
You can also boot from your pendrive if the computer allows it.
http://dynebolic.org/ allows you to keep your profile and data in your pendrive or on your windows-based computer …
Ah, but you have a Mac? Not sure about that.
My perception about adding other software is that it’s not easy for all, but doable.
The folks at worldchanging linked to distros for emergency situations – sounded good when I saw it but IIRC it was mostly Windows-based software.
There’s some appropriate noises (somewhere) about how to create a mesh network with antenae’d laptops – if they have the crank/solar/bike/younameit-power needed by the laptop plus the antena.
There must be some good pages about this stuff.
Hackers and DIYers should meet disasterologists, or is it the other way round? Sounds like open space to me – or just a google-search away?
Whatever works!
The thing about homedir-on-flashdrive is the important bit – like all your personal files should be stored there, along with any updates you make to the LiveCD… Does DamnSmallLinux do that? – I’ve taken a poke around but haven’t found anything…
Oh look, you’re right!!!
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Persistence
A little change puts your home directory on a flash drive. How cool is that?
Sorry, I didn’t realize it was already set up that way.
You can do this with a number of Live CD’s. I know you can do it with Knoppix and Ubuntu. It’s not exactly intuitive so you have to find the doc on how to do it but once you’ve done it, it works well.
Thumb drives are getting big enough now, though, that you could put a full desktop environment with the OpenBSD operating system (which is very small) onto the thumb drive, boot from that, and forget the DVD.