5 easy steps to install Puppy Linux on your USB drive

June 11, 2008

I have a 1GB mini SD card inside my cell phone that I barely use the space. So, I thought I’d add a Linux install inside it for those moments I have to use a computer at a cyber café (I’m cautious about security), or just do an emergency data recovery of a computer.

Puppy Linux was my distro of choice for this task. It is very small, the ISO is just 88MB. Also I felt this was the right moment for me with the release of Puppy Linux 4.0 aka Dingo, which seems to be much more user friendly.

• So, to install Puppy to a USB drive the first step is to download, burn, and run the ISO file.
• Next, once you see the desktop, the second step is to click on “Menu”, find “Setup” and choose “Puppy Universal installer”. In our case, choose “USB Flash Drive”;

• Third, I just went the easy route and followed with a click on “Install Puppy to … (name of USB drive)”

• Fourth, we’re prompted to enter the current location of the Puppy files, in our case CD (since we’re using a live CD)

• Just confirm the next dialogue request and for the last important option, make sure to select the option to create the bootloader “mbr.bin” file. With this mbr file, the computer should be able to load Puppy on boot without a problem.
• Click on the following OK buttons and in a few minutes a beautiful and highly functional tiny Linux distro was installed on the USB flash drive.

Puppy 4.0 is pretty stable, very easy to work with, and very fast. Best of all, extremely portable! Highly recommended distro to keep around.

Now, I must admit I read about Damn Small Linux but haven’t tested it yet. Any one willing to give their opinion on it?

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Posted in OS