First, my apologies, in that I'm sure some of what I'm about to ask has already been answered in various other places. But I'm new to Linux and am still in that awkward "bringing myself up to speed" phase.

Okay, here's the situation - I've been using Windows for a long time. Currently, I use Windows XP SP2, on both of my computers. All of my hard drives are formatted as NTFS.

Recently, I tried a Knoppix DVD, version 5.0.1. I've also tried out a few other live Linux CD and DVD distributions. I'm fairly impressed.

I own a few USB flash drives. You know, those little things smaller than a stick of gum, which can be plugged into a computer's USB port, to function sort of like removable hard drives.

Question 1 - Could you direct me to a set of step-by-step instructions which even a newbie could easily follow, for installing Knoppix onto a 1 gig USB flash drive, such that I'd be able to plug the flash drive into one of the USB ports on my computer, reboot, and have the computer run Knoppix (just as if I were booting off a live CD or DVD version of Knoppix)?

Question 2 - As mentioned, the OS upon which I rely is Windows XP SP2, and my hard drives are NTFS. It's the NTFS part that I think may cause problems, as I'm led to believe that Linux and NTFS don't get along all that well. (Yes, yes, I agree that it's all Microsoft's fault, and Microsoft is evil. But frankly, I'm more interested in finding solutions, than in assigning blame. And for a number of reasons, I absolutely cannot completely abandon Windows.)

So, let's say I'm visiting my mom for the weekend. While at her house, I stick the flash drive with Knoppix on it into the computer there, write a letter via OpenOffice's word processor, put together a small spreadsheet, and edit a picture taken with my digital camera. I save the resulting letter, spreadsheet, and picture, to a directory on the flash drive.

Then I go home and want to copy this work to the hard drive in my desktop computer.

Can I simply stick the flash drive into my desktop computer's USB port and copy the aforementioned files to my NTFS hard drive, with no problems?

If not, is there some other flavor of Linux that will let me do this? Or some simple, reliable, and safe work around?

Or do I fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Linux's alleged NTFS write problems?

Again, I'm sorry if all this has been gone over a hundred times before. I'm really trying to learn what I must about Linux, but there's a lot of information out there.
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Michael