E-Volution IT

Wouldn’t it be nice…

I travel a fair bit. Right now I am in Germany. I take a laptop with me when I can. Yet relatively often I find myself not able to easily access the Internet from my laptop. Sometimes I am staying at houses without Internet access. Sometimes I find myself visiting houses or places where these is Internet access yet I don’t have my laptop with me, such as visiting a friend. Internet is on hand, but my email checking system (a highly customised Thunderbird) and my web browsing system (a highly customised Firefox) are not on hand. Wouldn’t it be nice to carry all this around in my pocket?

These days it is possible to do just that — carry an entire operating system and a vast array of personalised applications in your pocket. This is in the form of a USB memory stick or a pocket hard drive. With some of these systems you can even boot up the OS and run all its applications from within an existing operating system on the host machine (virtualisation). Just plug in the USB device and start it up as a virtual machine. Here are the portable operating systems (all Linux based) I managed to find which looked worthy of my (and perhaps your) attention:

• DSL (Dame Small Linux). This one can boot from within the Host Operating system. A big plus I think.
• PenDriveLinux. This site provides a lot of info on running a wide range of Linux OSs from portable media, including how to run Linux within the host OS. They provide many great tutorials on how to get the most out of your portable OS experience. One example is how to run Ubuntu (v7.10) from a USB flash drive.
• FaunOS. Needs close to 1GB of space (so somewhat on the big side). Does not support virtualisation (booting within the host OS). Can set up a boot CD to boot it on machines that don’t support booting from USB (most computers more than a few years old).
• PuppyLinux. Appears to be about 60MB in size. "Overall, Puppy Linux is a superb, light-weight, fast and versatile Linux distribution with a great selection of applications, graphical system administration utilities and all sorts of unique features not readily available elsewhere. A great choice not only for older computers, but also for those who dislike the bloat of most modern distributions." - Distrowatch.com
  This is essentially a LiveCD distribution of Linux. It can, however, run from a USB drive. Does not appear to support virtualisation.
• Moka5 (LivePCs). "Moka5 LivePCs contain everything needed to run a virtual computer — an operating system and a set of applications. You can use LivePCs on your desktop, or you can take them with you on a portable USB drive." This is a different concept from the others listed above. Once Moka5 is installed, you can then run a wide range of available LivePCs (or create your own) which can be run from a hard disk or portable USB drive. For now Moka5 is free, but it might not stay that way.
• QUMU and QUMU Manager. Requires a little more technical knowledge, but the net result is the one gets a virtual machine of Linux running from a USB drive/key.

If you know of any others (particularly ones that natively support booting within the host OS) please let me know.