For many years, Linux has crushed the competition in full computers that fit in your pocket or on a key chain. Okay, so I'm being a bit deceitful in my wording. But it's still mostly true. Many Linux distributions provide "Live" images. A "Live" image is basically a bootable CD containing a full operating system and pre-installed software packages. In the case of a CD, the CD basically acts as a read-only hard drive with a bootable partition.

However, what has really made this neat are thumb drives. Not only is a thumb drive easier to carry around than a CD, but it is writable. With the capacity to write, there are now live images that will allow you to modify the image and save data when you are booted into the image. The result is that you can virtually pack your entire PC with all your personal applications and data onto a tiny thumb drive and take it anywhere you want to go. In my case, if I'm visiting my parents several hundred miles, there is no need to take my computer. I can just take my thumb drive to morph their computer into my own.

How To Make Your Own "Thumb PC"

Thankfully, I'm not inventing anything here. Setting up your own "Thumb PC" is super easy. My distribution of choice is Ubuntu so my instructions will use that.

• Go to the Ubuntu download page and download the distribution of your choice.
• On that same page, step 2, choose "USB stick" and your OS and click "Show Me How". You will be presented with all the tools and instructions you need.
• When creating the USB stick, be sure to choose to allocate space on the USB stick for persistence of documents and settings.
• Step 3 on that same page tells you how to boot from the USB stick. Some older computers are not capable of booting from a USB stick. You'll basically hit ESC or some F-key right when your computer boots to enter into boot options or to edit your bios. Once here, you will choose to boot from your USB stick, which might be called a USB Hard Drive.
• Once booted in, you can install programs, create files, or whatever you want, and it will be persisted to the thumb drive. It's pretty slick.

There are two downsides of booting from a USB stick. First, your space is limited. You can actually connect to any hard drives in the host PC once you are booted, but any files you save there won't be available when you go to another PC, so that would defeat the purpose of this method. Therefore, you'll want to keep it light. Only install/download what you need. You probably don't want to load this thing up with music and videos. But hey, maybe you have a huge USB stick and have plenty of room!

The second downside is speed. Reading and writing to/from a USB stick is quite a bit slower than a nice SATA disk drive or solid state drive. In particular, I notice that my PC boots quite slow. Once it is booted up, I notice slowness on occasion, particularly with I/O intensive activities, but I don't actually notice it most of the time. Common stuff like browsing the web is a snap.

Using your "Thumb PC" For Rescuing Data

On a side note, you can use your Thumb PC to rescue someone's computer. Let's say they've had something wacky go wrong with their computer and they are unable to boot. You may still be able to boot using your USB stick, mount their hard drive and access the data. If you're feeling a bit more devious, you can use this to access unencrypted data on a password-protected PC.

Other Storage Mediums

On the horizon, USB 3.0 is coming and should improve speeds dramatically. You may also be able to use E-SATA or Firewire devices, but I've never tried this (don't own any) so I really don't know if you can do that.