Just a few days ago a friend told me that he uses a Linux distribution on a USB-stick whenever he has trouble with his operating system. Although I won’t tell you which OS that is, I guess you figured it out already.

Many Linux distributions are available and a few of them were designed especially for slow computer and/or USB-sticks (also called pendrives). This directly points to the first Linux distribution I would like to introduce you to, which is designed for an installation on a portable device: Pendrive-Linux. Other options are Damn Small Linux (DSL) and TinyCore (TC). The latter one requires only 10MB of space. The reason why I’m writing about these distributions is simply that not everyone has a 4GB USB-stick or bigger available to install Ubuntu and might just want to try out other distributions anyways. If questions remain on how to install these, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Installing Linux onto your USB-stick:

Get UNetbootin and install it, just like you would install every other software for Windows. Next to that, download the distribution that you would like to try out, for example Ubuntu. Check before you download, if the Linux distribution you would like to try out is supported. Now everything is pretty much self-explanatory. Choose the distribution you would like to install and the folder, you saved the downloaded file in. The good thing about this process is, that you don’t need to burn an image to a CD. Just choose the .iso file and choose the drive you woulod like to install it onto. Now lean back and wait. After the installation you will be able to restart your computer from the USB-device (if supported) and work with an operating system, which is portable and doesn’t expose you to the danger of deleting files from your harddisk. The ‘normal’ installation process of Ubuntu (for example) is so easy though, that everybody who is able to press Enter often enough can install it – seriously.

Update:

An article at lifehacker.com pointed out a nice piece of software called uSbuntu. This software allows to create a bootable version of Ubuntu (and apparently other Linux distributions as well) onto a USB-stick. While this software might not be as comprehensive as UNetbootin (see above), it sure is an easy way to create a bootable version of your favorite Linux distribution. As my heading suggests, this software is Windows only, which I find rather funny.