[juspimoubbodo]

There are several other Linux distributions which can fit on a 128 MB USB drive, and of those, the ones I have tried with some success are:

Slax Popcorn - Best designed GUI
Puppy Linux - 111 MB
Feather Linux - Knoppix-Based

Basically, to boot Damn Small Linux from a removable USB drive, the steps are as follows:

First, make sure your BIOS is set up to boot from a USB device. You can enter the BIOS by pressing a certain hotkey as your computer first boots. This key, which can be an F- key or Delete, varies from computer to computer, but instructions are typically displayed on screen for a brief moment.

Once in the BIOS setup, find the section that edits the boot order of devices. Place USB before any Hard Disk in the list.

If your computer is not able to boot from USB, you can still use a boot floppy, which will then boot to USB. If this is the case, put your 3.5" floppy (or A: ) drive at the top of the boot list.

To make a floppy image, if needed, download the appropriate file from DSL's website and use the command dd to copy the file to USB. Windows users can search for and download a program called rawwrite32 to accomplish this task.

To perform a DSL USB installation, you must first make a DSL Live CD. Download the image file from the website and burn it to CD. In Windows, you will open your CD burning software, open the image file you downloaded, and burn it to CD. In Linux, you'll run cdrecord, using settings appropriate for your cd-r device.

Now, put the CD in your computer and make sure your BIOS has CD-ROM listed first in the boot order. DSL should boot.

A side note: There are many, many distributions that work off a Live CD or DVD. This is another option, if you do not have a USB drive at your disposal. Or, you can boot from CD and write your files to a USB, as you cannot write changes to your boot CD. Anyway, at this point, you have a fully functional Linux system up and running on your computer. Once you remove the CD and reboot, your computer returns to its previous state.

Now that you are running of the DSL Live CD, right click anywhere on the desktop to bring up the main menu. This will look similar to the Start menu in Windows, except it is not limited to the bottom left of the desktop. There is an option in there to make your USB drive bootable. If your drive is plugged in, it should appear as SDA in the list. Simply choose this, let DSL do its work, and then you should be ready to go.

Now you should be able to boot from USB, or from floppy to USB, or CD.

The instructions are slightly different for each distribution, but each distro should have documentation, a wiki, a faq, or forums on its website to give you helpful information.

And, in case you are not aware, every one of the distributions mentioned above are free to download and use. Tutorial written by: odessan82