USB ‘thumb’ (or ‘pen’) drives are one of those low-profile technological developments that you mostly don’t give much thought to; but when you do you realise just how amazing they are. Back in 1989 I bought my first 20GB hard-drive for my first PC The drive was big (perhaps a bit bigger than a video-cassette box), heavy and relatively fragile (if you were going to move the PC you had to remember to manually park the drive heads before powering-down). It cost over ?200. Today I can pay ?25 for a 500MB thumb drive that weighs essentially nothing and can live quite happily in the hostile environment of my work bag. Pretty maazing, when you think about it. Which I usually don’t.<\/p>\n
A few days ago, while on the train home from work, I was reading an article about how to install Linux on a thumb drive: the idea being that you can carry around a fully-configured system in your pocket for those inconvenient times when you don’t have access to your usual PC. Just find any old PC, plug-in the thumb drive, reboot, and (assuming the bios can handle it) the system boots the OS on the thumb drive rather than the one on the hard drive. I thought that this was moderately interesting but nothing that special. As it happened, I’d spent a large part of the day (the part I get paid for) running tests on a client-server system where the clients and server were each running on virtual machines using VMware<\/a>. VMWare is another piece of technology that I keep forgetting to remember is deeply impressive. It essentially allows you to run multiple copies of Windows (or Linux) on the same machine at the same time<\/i>. Each ‘guest’ machine thinks it is a real PC, and can access network resources via the real host PC.<\/p>\n So I thought, booting from thumb drives is all very well, but what I really want is something like WMware that lets me run a guest OS from a thumb drive without rebooting<\/i>. That way I don’t have to disturb the guest PC (which, in say a cyber-cafe, may be locked-down to prevent reboots). At first i thought one of the ‘live cd<\/a>‘ Linux distributions might do this, but it turned-out they all require a reboot.<\/p>\n Then I found something remarkable: the Embedded version of Damn Small Linux<\/a>. DSL is a small-footprint (50MB max) Linux distro that can boot from CD, and very good it is too. But the magic is in the Embedded version. This is essentially a pre-configured copy of DSL that runs in an open-source, VMware-like virtualisation system called Qemu<\/a>. Unzip DSL Embedded onto a thumb drive (or a hard-drive folder), run a batch file (no installation needed), and Damn Small Linux boots-up inside its own window. After a bit of grinding an X11-based desktop appears. If the host PC is on a DHCP-enabled hetwork then the Linux machine acquires its own IP address and you can access the net using the pre-installed browser (Firefox), email and ftp apps. Clients for vnc and terminal services are included, and I easily logged-into my home server.<\/p>\n This, my friends, is very, very cool<\/i>. And since it is also very, very free<\/i>, I urge you to try it. I couldn’t find the Embedded version on the DSL download page, but you can get it from ibiblio here<\/a> (53MB).<\/p>\n I’m going to play with this and see what it can do. First-up is to get Open VPN<\/a> working so that I can tunnel into my home network. Watch this space! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" USB ‘thumb’ (or ‘pen’) drives are one of those low-profile technological developments that you mostly don’t give much thought to; but when you do you realise just how amazing they are. Back in 1989 I bought my first 20GB hard-drive for my first PC The drive was big (perhaps a bit bigger than a video-cassette … Continue reading “Damn Small and Damn Cool”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyjohnson.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}