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Run OS from thumb drive?

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davidnix71:
I bought a refurb mp4-dvr/camera/usb 2.0 disk/mp3 player called iJoy for $80. The refurb part apparently is that I have to format the sd cards on a pc first, the iJoy won't do it anymore. The iJoy uses a Nokia 7210 cell phone battery or runs off the usb port if you plug it in.

Not content with the 128mb card that came with it, I went surfing for something bigger. I found and bought a 2 GB card and usb 2.0 thumb drive that uses sd cards together for another $80. There are 4 GB sd cards available but they are a lot more money.

If 2 gig fits on a card the size of a postage stamp and runs on the port power, is it possible to put an OS on a thumb drive and boot from it? 2 gig is more than enough for an OS and plenty of programs. Not every computer has a dvd drive, but usb is universal. It might be easier to boot from a cd and them plug in the thumb drive, but that would mean carrying around the disk.

Lead Head:
There has already been linux put on something like 512MB thumb drives, but if you are going to use a tumb drive you should have 512MB of ram or more because the amount of disk swaps to the tumb drive may kill it rather fast

H_TeXMeX_H:
Well the fact is that having a swap partition on any flash media (such as a usb thumb drive) will end up destroying it in the end. That's because flash drives have a limited number of writes ... and they get slower at reading and writing with use. Maybe if it were possible to not have a swap partition ... just use ram ... or heck every computer has a swap partition ... why not make it use that one ?

Pathos:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

only 50mb and lots of support for usb based linux.

Aloone_Jonez:
Knoppix will run with only 128MB of RAM and no swap partition but I'd recommend >256MB of RAM if you want to do anything worthwhile with it.

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