Lightning fast linux on USB pen drive

Shutting out the US presidential race and Winston Peter's latest campaign to bait the media in order to win votes, I turned to my toys.

It's been a goal for the past 15 months to get Linux up and running on my Acer Travelmate 2483 laptop, complete with wireless support, sound and all the usual Internet mod cons.

I moved the idea from thought to action about a couple of weeks ago when I went to DSE and bought a DSE USB Microdrive with 16GB of flash ram.

After some false starts with Ubuntu and Damn Small Linux, tonight I tried the AllInOne version of PenDrive Linux. Pendrive Linux is based on the Mandriva distribution.

I downloaded the 495MB zip file and extracted all the files to the FAT32-formatted USB key. Once I worked out I needed to run the makeboot.bat file from an *administrator* command prompt on Windows Vista, I was then able to boot the laptop from the USB key.

This method also avoids installing the Lilo or Grub bootloaders, leaving the main hard disk untouched.

I then connected to the Internet via ethernet cable (the Marvel Yukon 100Mb ethernet chipset and DHCP worked fine). I then tried to set up the wireless network. Pendrive Linux correctly identified the Broadcom wireless chipset and told me I needed to download the BCM43xxx firmware for it and provided the URL. The wireless setup task then allowed me to select the downloaded firmware and installed it. In another couple of minutes I had configured the wireless network, rebooted and was on the Internet wirelessly, using a Linux system started from the USB pen drive.

The sound works fine and I can play flash videos on YouTube without having to install anything. I used Ksnapshot to capture the image of my new Pendrive Linux desktop in this post and GIMP to scale to a smaller size.

In a word: Awesome.

In another word: FAST

The laptop has 1.5GB of RAM and the CPU runs at 1.73GHz. By modern standards, that's a very ordinary machine. Windows Vista reckens it's too slow to run the Aero user interface. Pendrive Linux, on the other hand, loves it. With all data on flash RAM in the USB drive, this system is much faster than the Windows Vista system it normally runs......despite the USB bus speed being slower than the mainboard data bus.

PenDrive Linux can be run in read-only "live" mode, or in persistent mode. The latter allows the system to save and use the same setings (and any new files), just like on any"normal" system.

I've written this post on it.