On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Yaron <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote: > I don't think the thumb drive would be a problem with running OpenOffice, > to be honest. I mean if it's booting on a halfway decent machine it'll be > fine. And it'd be a nice option to have it. > > What I really need, though, is Firefox and a terminal. Be nice to have > something that'll autoconfigure on just about any hardware I plug the > thing in - including being able to use whatever wifi adapter we might run > into! That's one of the reasons I liked Ubuntu - thing just worked. Hmm, I'm seeing mixed signals here. What specifically about the Ubuntu live CD on the thumbdrive didn't work for you? And was it just the wifi you're referring to that "just worked"? I'm a bit shocked because I use thumbdrives with Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 pretty much daily at work to test systems, and it is quite rare that I find systems that don't boot properly. I used the USB Startup Disk Creator that is in the Administration menu of Ubuntu by default. I'm still using 9.04 only because 9.10 doesn't seem to like using the "TORAM" boot option, and I haven't had time to figure out why. And if you aren't aware, that option is very nice because you can boot off the thumbdrive, and then as soon as you get up to the desktop, you can tell it to unmount the thumbdrive and run completely off RAM. I don't advise trying that in a system with less than 2GB of RAM, though. Not a problem for me, since most of the systems I test have a bare minimum of 4GB. With that last bit aside, I believe when you use the built in USB Startup Disk Creator, it gives you an option to set aside a portion of the thumdrive's capacity to store changes. If you choose to do that, changes you make to your user account should be persistent. I'm not sure if it goes so far as to save installed packages, but it should at least save any changes you make to the UI for the next time you boot. - Justin