Comments on: Thoughts on running Linux from a Flash card.

By: slacy

slacy — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:11:41 +0000

Hi Tom,

I haven’t tried this method with newer (9.04) ubuntu installations, but I know that the Live CD is a graphical installer, and that will be outrageously slow, as you mention. The JEOS respin was canned for 9.04, so I would suggest starting with the “alternate” install disk, which will have a text based installer. You can download that from here: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#alternate

The biggest thing to remember is that you don’t want to boot directly into a graphical system when you’re running off flash under emulation. That will be horribly slow. The right way to think about it is to boot into text mode, and use either VNC or a remote display to do any graphical work that you need to do.

Granted, without accelleration, it will still be slow, but I found VNC under emulation to actually be a fairly workable solution.

By: Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:46:42 +0000

I tried the steps above to discover that Ubuntu under qemu runs extremely slowly on a 3.2 GHz dual core. This is because the accelerated mode is only runnable if the administrator privileges are accessible. Since they aren’t on this computer, that means that it takes about 10 miinutes to start up the Ubuntu Live CD, two minutes to open the networking dialogue, five seconds (or more) to see the results of any click on a menu item.

Any hints to speed it up?

By: Felix

Felix — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:47:59 +0000

This looks really good and I would love to have the same setup on a USB but from the article I’m not sure how to go about it. Please could you make it a little more step-by-step or link to another resource
Thank you.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:09:12 +0000

I am thinking about putting a system like this together myself, any hints? I have been using qemu puppy for a couple of weeks now, and it is great, the one advantage of it over your system is that (at least I think) it can be booted natively as well, and when it is it runs very fast, which is at least nice to get it up and running as a system. I would love to hear how this worked out for you though…

By: ⌘f » Blog Archive » the future of the internet and how to stop it by jonathan zittrain

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:49:55 +0000

[...] so that computers couldn’t be booted from the C drive. Of course, nowadays you can just run a Linux emulator from your USB flash drive, so I imagine student workers are in charge of the F1 key [...]