Installing Linux On Pen Drive

Portability is rapidly becoming the need of the hour as we switch between office and home and other places, we need to have access to all our important documents,bookmarks and other stuff we use often.

Linux has come to the rescue by offering small linux distros which can easily fit into pen drives even as small as 64MB!

Damn Small Linux , the linux distro that is preferred by most due to small size and high functionality is what I will guide you through on how to install in on a pen drive.

Here are a few requirements that you need to have during the tutorial:

A 64MB or larger Pen Drive
Extracting Utility like WinRar
DSL zip files
syslinux
HP-USB Format Tool (optional)

Tutorial on how to install Damn Small Linux(DSL) on a Pen Drive :

Step 1 : Format the USB Pen Drive

You need to format the pen drive in FAT or FAT32 format to install DSL on it. You can use the inbuilt utility in windows to format or you use download the HP-USB format utility for the same purpose.

Step 2 : Download DSL and extract it to pen drive

You need to download the DSL file to your PC. The file is in zip format and can be downloaded from here. You can either use one of the FTP mirrors or download the torrent. The file size of this file is 49MB. After downloading the zip file, you need to unzip the contents of the zip file to your pen drive. You can can any extracting utility like WinRar for this purpose.

Step 3 : Download syslinux and unzip it to PC

Next you need to download the syslinux zip file. The download link to the file can be found here. After downloading the file, unzip the file to a directory called syslinux on your PC.

Step 4 : Run some commands in command prompt

Fire up the command prompt by going to run and t

yping cmd. After that type cd syslinuxwin32 after navigation to the folder where you have placed the syslinux directory. After that type syslinux.exe -ma X: where X is the drive letter of your USB pen drive.

Step 5 : Change boot priority in BIOS

To be able to run the DSL, you need to boot from the pen drive and for that, you need to reboot your PC and from the BIOS change the boot priority settings and set ‘boot from USB device’ as the first preference!

That is it! You are now to boot from pen drive into DSL and after booting you can customise it to your needs and all changes get saved to your pen drive. Now take the world with you wherever you go!