Load Knoppix to USB Memory Card?

[Nadrach]

Having recently found an 8Gb USB memory card available for <£85, I was wondering on the possibilities of loading Knoppix to such a device in a mobile "boot-and-use" configuration (who needs a computer, use any handy one available ...). Has anyone tried this? Does the knoppix-installer accept a USB stick rather than a conventional HD - obviously the install will still need the full hardware search/ID from the CD/DVD. I haven't found anything on this in the forums, so far; if there is a topic, please point me ...

Cheers!

[Harry Kuhman]

I have not had any sucess with booting from these USB devices. While I don't have one large enough for Knoppix, I have tried the Knoppix based DSL (Damn Small Linux) on a UBS flash drive. The new version of DSL has an installer for flash drives that makes the whole process of building the flash drive very clean and examining the drive I can see that it seems to be well structured and bootable. But my notebook (an HP 4240) refuses to boot it. It does have a BIOS option that lets me boot from external USB devices first, but it just doesn't seem to see the drive. I had a chance to try the same drive on a friend's IBM notebook this weekend. After a few flase starts reconfiguring the BIOS we finally saw the initial screen, but during the boot process the computer seemed to move around drives and suddenly could not find the USB drive any longer. It dropped us to that "very limited shell". Never got it working beyond that.

So my advice would be before buying this device with the hope of getting Knoppix to run on it, let DSL install itself to a smaller flash device and see if your system can run from it. If not I wouldn't waste the time and money on the larger device. If DSL does work then you at least have a shot at getting Knoppix working. But I don't expect the Knoppix installer will make this clean for you (heck, it seems to never get things like networking right even when used with a normal target drive). Bt you'll at least know if it can work or not for your hardware.

[dvryknopper]

Here is a non-knoppix derived version of linux, I have only tried it out via livecd, but here is the section of its website descrbing as usb thumb drive install:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/flash-puppy.htm

[Nadrach]

Fine! Flash-puppy looks interesting, Knoppix may be a pain. Still worth investigating. I'm aiming for the 8Gb USB card anyway, at that price it's a bargain. I already extensively use a 512Mb card for backup/transfer between several machines, one of which is an elderly Toshiba laptop whose CD/DVD drive just died. With an increasing amount of AVI/JPG files to shift around, the 8Gb will be a well-used capacity. I may try some experiments in loading Knoppix first, and if it doesn't work, c'est la vie - I still have considerable use for the card. Keep you posted - I'm off to a LUG.