How To Run Linux From A USB Flash Drive
Most of the time, Linux is run from either an installation on a hard drive or a live CD/DVD distribution. The first is fast, but not very portable; the second can be run anywhere you have a computer and a CD drive with boot access, but typically isn't very fast. Over the last few years, though, we've seen the emergence of something that combines the speed of a hard drive install with the convenience of a live CD: running Linux from a USB flash drive.
While flash memory prices are still high enough that a flash-based 100-GB hard drive is still way out of the realm of what would be affordable for most people, 2-GB and 4-GB flash drives are cheap enough to make a streamlined Linux installation practical.
