Linux on a stick

davewebster — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:05:00 GMT

After a brief chat with Hans Verbeeck I decided (well Hans suggested) that I mess around with some 'competitive' technology. We chose a small Linux distro (SLAX popcorn). Now the idea is to boot from a memory stick and get the exact same environment on any machine. I mean think about it.. you travel to a meeting place or conference with just yourr OS on a memory stick on your keychain. Plug in the stick and boot and any machine looks like your own.

Well after some setup I have it installed and running.

First build your image. You can download the ISO file, mount it or burn a CD and run the Make_disk.bat file to build your image.
Next adjust your bios to boot from the USB device. This varies from one bios to another but usually you insert your USB stick, reboot, hit F2 to go to your bios setup. Select the hard disk option and promote the USB stick to be ahead of the Hard Drive. On other bios's you can specifiy to always check for the USB device first.

Now the goal is to be able to boot from any machine with any hardware configuration. It is really close but there are still some issues with the wireless cards which vary considerably between machines and networks and general hardware detection has problems on my distro; I still need to tweak the settings after startup. Also I noticed that some machines will hang when loading SLAX. On my Ferrari I need to run 'slax nohotplug', on my daughter's machine I need to run 'slax nopcmcia'.

Now why would a Microsoft employee do this let alone blog about it? Well for a couple of reasons;

1. Its cool.

2. Microsoft is not really in that business. No really! This is not a substitute for a managed corporate desktop or an easy to use home OS. But it has its place - I think.

3. I wanted to scare and then reassure my colleagues (see 2).

We can imagine a time when all you take into a meeting room is your smart card or stick with your OS on it. But then nothing is lighter than carrying your userid and password in your head and storing your documents in the 'cloud'.

What do you think?

Dave Webster's WebLog : linux

Linux on a stick