Want to run Linux any time, any place? Here's what to do with popular distributions like Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and Fedora, so you can boot up directly from your thumb drive.

Fedora 9 now lets you create a bootable Linux distribution on a flash drive with persistence. In other words, you can not only boot any PC that will accept USB drive booting into Linux, you can even boot into your own personal desktop. Now, that can be useful.

UNetbootin allows you to easily adapt a Linux CD image to boot off of a USB flash drive or memory card. Have a system without a CD drive? Create a bootable USB drive to run your Linux installer.

This would work just like a LiveCD, with the big improvement that all your data could be saved onto the USB drive! This means not just your documents, but also e.g. network settings or your desktop background. You were practically carrying around a fully-functional operating system on your USB drive!

It is well known that the so-called "solid-state disks" (SSD) have very low access times. I could have tried to buy an SSD, but being a tinkerer, I decided for another option. Thumb drives / flash drives / pen drives are also a kind of SSDs, one could say - but they have lousy transfer rates. In the end, I decided to create a software RAID using four 2GB USB drives.

Everybody who owns a computer will someday need to dispose of a disk drive. Before you do, it is a good idea to cleanse the drive, so no one can read your sensitive information. Deleting files and reformatting is not sufficient; determined effort can still reveal data from a drive even after it appears to be gone.

TrueCrypt is free software that encrypts data “on-the-fly”. You can create an encrypted hard drive, a separate partition or a directory. TrueCrypt is portable -- it works on GNU/Linux and Windows. Worried about losing your valuable data when your laptop gets stolen? Don't wait and encrypt your data now!

One of the (very many) areas in which Linux has pulled ahead of the pack is with live, complete Linux distributions on every form of removable media. Tiny Linuxes to full-blow kitchen sink Linuxes boot and run from USB sticks and drives, Compact Flash cards, CDs and DVDs; so they never need to touch the hard drive, or even have a hard drive present. Some of them run entirely in memory.

SLAX is a minuscule version of the well-known Slackware Linux distribution. It is a LiveCD operating system that does not need to be installed on a computer’s hard drive as it can boot and run from either a USB or a CD drive. There is also an option to run SLAX from RAM. It is now time to take a microscopic look at this tiny distro. But first, some SLAX facts...