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...Arch! I have it on a 4 GB USB key for just this reason; works great.
i saw your comment the other day and made an install on an eight gig flash drive (as per the instructions from the wiki). it seemed very slow. i had kde base, utills and a couple of gtk apps installed, it was painfully slow compared to my real install. but yeah it works. a good wiki page too.
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graysky wrote:...Arch! I have it on a 4 GB USB key for just this reason; works great.
i saw your comment the other day and made an install on an eight gig flash drive (as per the instructions from the wiki). it seemed very slow. i had kde base, utills and a couple of gtk apps installed, it was painfully slow compared to my real install. but yeah it works. a good wiki page too.
Flash drives are slow, really slow, unless you are willing to pay good money for one with good write speed.
These days I'm using something like this:
0.13GB /boot ext2
5.79GB / ext4 without journal
2.10GB /home ext4 without journal
and it seems a little faster than having everything as ext2 (might be a placebo effect). Filesystem checks are quite fast due to the use of ext4 in the larger partitions, however it is not as fast as an internal hard disk (but that's expected). I'm using x86_64 because sometimes I need to chroot into 64bit installs but I've run into 32bit only machines and I was stuck, but those are getting rarer these days so it's not much of a problem.
R00KIE
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linux mint because when im using it as a flash install im usually showing linux off to others and mint is the easiest distro for
newbies to grasp.
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Salix OS! Based on Slackware, has a "persistant" feature (save you data on usb flash and restore it), lightweight...
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Depending on the software you need, DSL is certainly the fastest. Of course, if you have an alright network connection at work, there is a portable version of NXClient for Windows so you can access your FreeNX running on Arch. There's a great wiki page on FreeNX to get you started, since that might be far more convenient than effectively dual-booting with the USB and needing to reproduce the system you want on it.
Crunchbang would be my top suggestion for a LiveUSB with great speed and software selection, although Arch on a USB sounds very appealing.
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Maybe not for everyday-work, but for preparing and rescueing a computer, I would suggest RIPLinuX, too.
"The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven" -- John Milton
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I am happily running Arch off a 512MB DOM module and I have not stripped anything but some /usr/share/doc and /man. If you need to go lower try Alpine Linux, DSL or Tinycore. Also on a related note, I found out that NILFS2 works well on USB flash memory due to the lack of unnecessary journal writes which prevents wearing down.
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Just as a pilot project, I installed Arch onto a spare TWO gigabyte usb drive of mine. 512mb for home, 1.5gb for root.
I've only explicitly installed chromium, openbox, pypanel, feh, pcmanfm, lxappearance, lxterminal, obconf, and mmaker, that I can remember. Lol, I've already used up 88% of the root partition.
My next step is to custom compile a kernel to make it drastically smaller.
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