Did you know that is ridiculously simple to install Ubuntu onto an external USB flash drive?
If you have a copy of the latest version of Ubuntu (at the time of writing that is 8.10), there is a very simple program that does it all for you.
You will need:
- An Ubuntu 8.10 CD (or ISO image if already installed)
- A USB drive with at least 700-800 MB free space
While you are booted into Ubuntu, go to System > Administration > Create a USB startup disk.
You'll need to choose the source disc image for Ubuntu. If you have your Ubuntu CD in the drive, this should appear in the list, so make sure it is selected. Alternatively, you can click 'Other' and specify where the .iso image of the Ubuntu CD is.
Next, plug in your drive and choose it as your destination drive (and double-check it's the right drive before going ahead).
You can also choose how much space will be reserved for saving data on the new drive, or turn data storage off (it will act just like the Ubuntu live CD).
That's it! Simply press Make Startup Disk and wait while the files are copied over.
On many modern PCs that are configured to allow USB boot, you should be able to just restart the machine with the USB drive plugged in and Ubuntu should boot straight from it!
It's a nice simple way to have a copy of Ubuntu in your pocket, wherever you go.
SystemRescueCD, which I covered very recently has just released version 1.0.1.
The new version features JWM as the window manager to replace WindowMaker, updates much of the included software to the latest versions (including Gparted), includes some new features and fixes several bugs.
- Using JWM-2.0.1 as default Window-Manager instead of Window-Maker
- Using unionfs-2.2.4 as the root filesystem (all files are now writable)
- Updated sys-block/gparted to 0.3.6 (add support for the labels)
- Updated squashfs to 3.3 (with LZMA compression) to save space
- Updated sys-fs/ntfsprogs to 2.0.0 since it's marked as stable in gentoo
- Updated sys-fs/ntfs3g to 1.2310 (ntfs full read-write support)
- Updated the Memtest86+ floppy disk image to 2.01
- Updated the btrfs filesystem support to 0.13 (kernel patch and utils)
- Updated the default kernel to Linux-2.6.24.04 with Reiser4 (rescuecd + rescue64)
- Updated app-cdr/cdrkit-1.1.7.1 (Fix for Joliet directory length bug)
- Added sys-apps/ipmitool (Utility for controlling IPMI enabled devices)
- Added missing crypto modules in the default kernel (rescuecd + rescue64)
- Added skipmount=/dev/xxx option that prevents the system from mounting a device
- Replaced cryptsetup-luks with cryptsetup-1.0.5
- Autodetect software raid volumes at boot time using 'mdadm --auto-detect'
- Fixed an autorun bug introduced in 1.0.0: no stdout for interactive scripts
- Fixed bugs in the network configuration boot options (ethx, gateway, dns)
- Fixed problems with udhcpc client when multiple ethernet interfaces exists
- Prevents multiple setkmap when "sysresccd-custom setkmap" used several times
The full release notes are here, and the live CD can be downloaded from the site.
