Ubuntu Linux on a thumb drive - My new favorite toy

I've clearly been behind the door for the past four years, but I'm making up for lost time with my new favorite toy - Ubuntu Linux running inside portable VirtualBox under Windows from a USB thumbdrive. Basically, this means I can go up to a Windows machine, pop in a USB stick and open Linux in a window (goggle), or set the machine to boot from USB, hit restart and have a Linux box until I pull the thumbdrive and restart again (goggle - goggle).

I'm a software developer, web apps, lots of the stuff they make me work with on the server side runs on Linux, and Ubuntu runs all of it, so I have a whole, neat, discrete server-side development environment in my pocket. And when I don't want that (i.e,. when I'm using my Windows machine natively to write docs, draw pretty pictures, listen to music) I can make it go away.

Now, when I show this to really smart, hip people, they look at me like one of those folks who only just discovered Twitter - so clearly, the whole world has had multiple operating systems on their PCs for a while and I'm the last person to figure it out. But now I'm finally smart, hip and cool too, and (being a populist) I'm gonna show YOU how to be as cool as I am.

First, get a contemporary thumbdrive. Not sure of capacity requirements, here, but anything above a Gig and you should be safe. They give 60GB thumbdrives away in crackerjack now, I think ...

Then surf here and follow the instructions. Don't freak out at the French - just ignore anything written in a language you don't understand and you should be fine. The French part means: "uSbuntu Live Creator is a free Windows program that lets you create a bootable USB stick ('cle USB' (literally) 'USB key') with Ubunto 8.10 or 9.04. The program also gives you the option of virtualization, letting you launch Ubuntu directly inside of Windows without configuring or installing it." In other words, it's just the part of the documentation that you skim while going 'blah, blah, blah' anyway.

Follow the instructions - no harder than making biscuits and less beating - and you, too, will have Ubuntu on a USB stick and be able to amaze your friends and colleagues.

I've been using Ubuntu 9.04 in both installed, thumb and virtual cd versions. Works great all around. I revived a really old Thinkpad with Ubuntu that I would now put up against any of the netbooks out there

I've been running the Remix release in a variety of configurations including via USB, as a VM under windows and dual booting.

The performance relative to win xp on my netbook has been fantastic.

Thanks for the tip on Virtual box. I too have been experimenting with Ubuntu (9.04) on a USB key, and having the environment virtualized on XP seems like a cool thing to try. Far more useful than the dual boot.

Yes, virtual machines are cool. To be cooler than that, you can take advantage of one of the coolest features of GNU/Linux - the desktop is virtual. The X-window-system which has been part of the *NIX world since the 1980s is a networked display. This means that not only can you run multiple platforms and applications on one machine but you can display them running that way on another machine. It is hard to describe but some examples may do.

Suppose you are running FireFox and have heard of the newest release and want to try it out. Instead of upgrading your current installation or installing it on a virtual machine, you can log in over the network to another machine, install FireFox there and play with it over the network. This does not require any extra applications, it uses the X-window-system and openSSH which come with most distros that I have seen. To iconify this, just create an icon and where command goes, put

ssh -Y user@someothermachine firefox --no-remote

This opens a window on your current desktop but you get to interact with a GUI app on another machine. This works even if the GUI is running on a virtual machine in the other machine... The mind boggles, but it can be made quite transparent to the user by file sharing the /home directory and so forth so that the user is unaware where the app is running.

This kind of technology is the basis of many thin client systems where the heavy lifting gets done on a server somewhere else. It is a powerful tool for interacting and managing servers and virtual machines in them. A lot of server management can take place with typed commands but if you want to see what the user will see, this is the way to go. There are still other technologies like VNC that allow you to control a user's mouse and type for him. This is a great teaching/desktop-help tool.

Further, if you want to run the most services/virtual machines you can on servers, look into using *NIX operating systems. In a given amount of RAM you should be able to run more processes because only one instance of a library or application is usually needed. RAM is cheap these days but you still want to do the most with what you have. Virtual machines have a lot of uses but they still take a bite out of your RAM.