Battle Of The Thumb Drive Linux Distros

We were expecting eye gouging and body slams, but this review of several thumb drive Linux distributions will do. They compared Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora. They don’t mention why they chose these four specifically, as UNetbootin has many many distributions available. They put each through its paces, listing common issues and boot up speed.

Their conclusion was that puppy Linux was preferable as it has a graphically nice interface and the ability to have persistent data storage on the disk. They have a poll going though, so head over and voice your opinion.

28 thoughts on “Battle Of The Thumb Drive Linux Distros

  1. Mandriva Flash FTW!

    Of course, they only sell it preloaded…but if you have a thumbdrive you can install it yourself from their One CD. But it’s a much larger distro than back in the old days; apparently it needs a whole 1.5 gigs now.

  2. dslinux WOOT!
    i run it offa pico itx without a hard drive, just on a 8 gig pico supertalent gold flash drive.
    it’s the coolest thing in the universe, i made the case out of aluminum so its only as big as the motherboard, has onswitch four usb ports,mic and speaker cable and the vga ports through pin connectors, so theres no space lost beyond the motherboard, it has an option for hdmi and dvi ports but i didnt include them because i dont use them. but yeah DSL is fking awesome, all i need is a net surfer, a word processor, a sdk, and a meek media player for my musics, the next step in my super cool plan is to adapt a battery for it so it can go in my pocket, and buy some of those myvus that you can see through!! and i’ll have like a mobile ComputerMan(r) KICKASSSS

    but i dont have the funds
    so it’s just the desktop running dsl lol
    but it kicks ass
    but the book official dsl book kinda sucks, and i paid hella monies for it too!

    -hero

  3. AWESOME! I just bought an old laptop from someone and I just started looking for an os that might run smoothly on a 10 year old comp.

    The guy I bought it from had xp on it, so this is eerily convenient.

  4. dsl works great for old hardware, but not new hardware. kinda defeats the purpose of a usb stick boot since older hardware doesn’t support that. works wonders with a cd boot on my old pentium mmx laptops though. I’ll have to look up backtrack. My favorite live linux though is helix mainly because I generally use a live linux to help people recover data from windows hard drives when windows hoses the registry.

  5. DSL is not so hot even for the older hardware because the X server only supports 60hz, so with a CRT monitor I got rioting headaches from the eyestrain.

    I just got Puppy Linux and I think it rocks, still too slim on media support, but that isn’t important for an email/web box.

    The real problem is lack of USB boot support, but if you check out something like this you can use it for almost any PC: http://www.logicsupply.com/products/t512mdom40vs

    I am thinking of getting one loaded with PuppyLinux and BartPE to help me in my freelance PC repair work. Maybe even using NTlite set to always boot in safe mode :) I get a lot of people who need a volume check before their PC will boot, but after the check their PC runs fine for years. I think it is overheating and the PC writes some garbage to the disk.

  6. i dont see how anyone likes DSL. it’s not for a beginner anyway.. puppy linux is really nice, especially if your hard drive blows up. if you have low ram it will suck, but you can kinda make up for it by letting it use alot of your flash drive.
    puppy linux= win. for looks, for hardware support, for having flashplayer built in..
    you can’t play quakelive on it.. but there is a shit -ton of built in features. burners, rippers, players, mixers, recorders, editors, viewers, scanners, download accelerator, you2pup youtube downloader, torrent creator/downloader.
    and a nice GUI.. can anyone say that about damnsmalllinux?

  7. Puppy Linux is really good solution – I used it few times, trying to save some files from corrupted Windows installations. But, today, when we have USB’s with large capacities, Ubuntu can, also, be installed, or openSUSE…

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