Ubuntu QA:
BlogBrainstorm
Log in
Ubuntu QA
The Ubuntu community has contributed 12232 ideas, 57574 comments, 1174524 votes

Idea #329: Sell it on a memory stick



bug This idea is a duplicate of idea #16: LiveUSB.
up
78
down
Written by allthingspossible the 29 Feb 08 at 00:39. Category: Installation.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Description
Put Ubunutu on a bootable USB device of 8 or 16 Gig, with access to the hard drive (ntfs, whatever) for personal storage.
It will be non-committal like a live-cd, fast, and can save configuration. You can basically take your pc in your pocket and show off linux to everyone.
Tags: (none)

Attachments
No attachments.


Duplicates


Comments
coleki wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 02:42
Good idea, until the customer buys it, walks by a magnet with it, and then gets upset when it doesn't work. I think non-volatile ROM is still the better way to go.

Greyor wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 03:55
I second that. It's just about as easy to carry around a LiveCD -- and cheaper -- if all you want to do is show off Linux to people.

Lars Noodén wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 08:45
CDs only hold about 650 MB. CF and SD cards can hold gigabytes worth of data. The ability to guarantee authenticity of the distro might be at greater risk on RW media.

Greyor wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 08:57
Personally, I burned the Ubuntu ISO onto a DVDR, so that's substantially larger than a CD's capacity.

The USB drive isn't a bad idea in theory, but again, as coleki mentioned, I'd worry about the possibility for failure. At least you know that if you're playing around with RAM on a system (and can email your current projects to yourself, etc.), you're not going to lose anything vital.

jhol wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 03:50
Ubuntu sells memory sticks .
It would be magnificent if they were bootable.

jhol wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 03:50
Here is the link to the stick: https://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=110

probono wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 18:27
http://klik.atekon.de/wiki/index.php/CustomizeUbuntuLive

Dreamsorcerer wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 19:00
To previous comments:

I don't think damaging it is really a risk, how many times have you lost all the files you store on your flash drive?

Anyway, this is different from a LiveCD, it is much more practical. You can take an entire OS with you in your pocket (I couldn't fit a CD in my pocket), it would have all your settings and applications installed, and you could boot up your own OS on nearly any computer. Boot-up time would be closer to harddrive speed, rather than taking in excess of 5 minutes with a CD. Excess space on the flash drive can be used to store all your files like a regular flash drive, which you wouldn't be able to do on a CD.

And, finally, I can't believe you havn't heard of this idea before, Mandriva is already selling one, and I really want one, both to show off a fully customised desktop to friends and to use Linux in class, on the computers at college, Windows XP on those computers is really slow, not to mention the software itself is less productive.

http://mandriva.org/en/product/mandriva-flash-2008

xiota wrote on the 5 Mar 08 at 20:51
I'm pretty sure memory sticks and flash drives are non-magnetic. So no worries about demagnetizers and such.

jespdj wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 19:19
Corruption is not a real problem with memory sticks, so I don't see this as a problem.

It would be really nice to have a portable Ubuntu. Booting and installing from a memory stick is much faster than from a CD, and a memory stick is read/write, so this would make it possible to install software / save data while running from the USB stick.


Post your comment