As I was waiting for installs from last night’s experience with my father’s Dell laptop, I remembered that this kid from the lab is getting real excited about linux and is always asking questions about it. He told me he had an older computer running Win98 which is no longer used because it is too slow and just completely bogged down.
At the beginning of the summer, I too had a Win98 machine which I REVIVED by installing Damn Small Linux on it. This is a 50MB OS! That’s ridiculously small! It comes with GUI, games, FireFox, an office suite, and a whole lot more. Here’s a pic:
So I burned the kid a CD with the iso. He has no experience with linux and this would be great for him to learn on. And he’ll be using an older computer so he can’t go wrong.
When I got to the lab, I put the CD on my laptop to show him around the OS a bit and I said “this is really meant to be on memory stick and just carried with you.” He said, “can you do that so I don’t take your CD?” I decided to do it just because I had never done it before. :)
How NOT to do it
I went to the DSL FAQ Wiki and looked at the process to creating the partitions and installing the iso on the usb mem stick. Here’s the FAQ that has the directions (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_to_a_USB_Flash_Drive). When I saw the directions indicate fdisk this and that, I got a little worried. Last thing I want is to incorrectly point fdisk and wipe my drive clean. I installed GParted and as I was looking for it, I saw Ubuntu’s “USB Startup Disk Creator”. I tried to install the image using this utility, but apparently the utility only works for Ubuntu iso’s so it erred.
How to do it
After a few more minutes of reading, I saw a mention of UNetbootin. I looked in synaptic, and BAHM! found it. I immediately installed it, and ran it (Applications > System Tools > UNetbootin).
Browse to the iso in “Diskimage” field. In “Type” field select “USB Drive” and whatever the location of your USB device is. Then click OK. Done.
Result
The USB works great! Well, worked on my laptop beautifully but didn’t work on my friend’s Dell netbook (go figure — Dell doesn’t like to play nice).
