Today I decided to install GNU/Linux on a pen drive, and after some looking around I decided to go with an easy solution. I didn't want to create anything new, just test drive a distribution running on a flash disk.

After a couple of searches I found http://www.pendrivelinux.com/, which is a great site with tutorials on how to run several distributions on a pen drive, including, but no limited to, Debian and Ubuntu. Image running a full Ubuntu install on a Sony Micro Vault; it doesn't get better than that.

After some digging around I decided to give their .IMG a try, which includes Debian with Gnome. No add-ons. Just the operating system with the desktop environment. After following the tutorial I had a bootable USB disk with 'live persistent' boot option, so that changes are saved.

The next step is to remaster Ubuntu 8.04, remove and install some software, and have a custom 'remastered' Ubuntu version for the USB pen drive.