First of all, it is important to point out that you do not need to be an expert to install Linux on a 128 MB USB stick. With the opensource Puppy distribution , Linux can be inserted on a USB stick and the whole operating system does not occupy more than 100 Megabytes including all the essential applications: an office suite, a browser for surfing the internet, an e-mail program, various software to view photos, edit images listen to CDs and MP3s, view videos and films and many other applications.
This means that you can always have your own operating system available on a pen drive, light and fast, complete with Office for writing documents, which goes on the internet and recognizes the various peripherals possibly connected (even the CD) with your saved profiles. and your files.
READ ALSO: Best Linux distros for old PCs
To have Linux on a USB stick, you must understand that Puppy is a Live distribution, that is, it does not require any installation and the files of the same system are copied directly to the stick.
In another article we illustrate Wubi which is used to install Linux Ubuntu on Windows as if it were a very normal program so without formatting, partitioning or virtualizing and you will have both windows and Linux on the same PC.
Another post is dedicated to virtual PCs and therefore use Windows and Linux simultaneously on the same PC.
In practical terms to install Puppy :
- Download the .ISO file from the Puppylinux.org website.
UPDATE: To install puppy in an even simpler and safer way on the first try, you must download UNetbootin which allows, through a graphical interface, directly from Windows, the installation on a USB stick of Puppy Linux making the pendrive bootable on PC boot. (UNetbootin allows you to install any linux distribution from pendrive directly as seen from its homepage).
You can then skip the part listed and resume reading from " Restart PC" .
- To open an .ISO file you can use Daemon Tools or similar lighter programs
(free) to create a virtual CD player and open the ISO file (the ISO file is a CD image) or use the Mounge Explorer Tool (free software) which will see the ISO archive as if it were a folder.
- Make the USB stick
bootable at the start of the PC: for the PenDrive to be bootable at power on, at boot of the pc computer with Windows, it must be formatted with a different program called linuxliveusb.
- After formatting the key, you need to copy the puppy.ISO archive files to the USB key (with the simple Drag'n Dorp).
- Restart the PC and set, via Bios (to access the Bios you generally use the delete key but it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer), boot from USB.
- The game is done, Puppy will normally start as the computer operating system, you will have to choose the language and video settings, after which this screen will appear.
In more technical terms, the operating system uses the PC's RAM as if it were the Windows TMP folder and the key itself as the system disk; the hard disk of the PC and its possible partitions will never be touched and any modification or creation of new files is stored on the RAM. When the PC is shutdown and then Puppy is closed, the system will ask whether to save all the changes made during the session, including the documents and files created.
All saves are done on the USB stick.
Warning, the files created by Puppy are not readable with Windows but only by Puppy or other Linux distributions; vice versa the Windows files that are inside the hard disk, can be read by Puppy and also modified or copied in Puppy; again, if you create a file with Puppy such as a word document, you can transfer it to the hard disk of the PC.
Puppy has reached version 4 much more stable than the previous ones and its speed of execution of programs and applications is surprising.
the manual is available in English.
Puppy, as well as all live systems, become really useful when you find a PC that no longer starts because Windows reports a missing or corrupt system file: mark the name of the file, download it from the internet, insert it on the stick, do start puppy and copy the same file, from the stick, on the hard disk to the right folder; that's how I solved a problem with the biosinfo.txt file.
In another article, the procedures to create USB sticks bootable with Linux Ubuntu or Fedora always installed in Live mode are described while the same installation procedure can be useful to install the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint system on a USB stick.
