I arrived at my sister’s in LA yesterday. Due to how silly cheap it was to ship it to a US address, I had my new thinkpad x61 shipped to her place. I cracked it open last night. The x61 is one of the smallest, lightest laptops you’ll find these days. In order to achieve those attributes they abandoned an optical drive. Without a DVD drive, how to you ditch vista and install ubuntu?

The answer was alarming painless to pull off. You follow these instructions and create a bootable USB flash drive with the latest version of ubuntu on it. Yes, this is a nerd post so move on or be prepared.

Maybe I’m new to this but this is cool. I now have a 2GB USB drive with a complete live version of ubuntu that can save it’s state. What’s that mean? It means I can plug that into any pc with a USB port and a BIOS that can boot from USB, restart, and I’m up and running in a full instance of linux running on that flash drive.

The one thing I did differently from those instructions is that I didn’t have a cd copy of ubuntu. Instead I simply downloaded the ISO, extracted it locally and copied the files from there.

Why would you ever do that? Well in my case it allowed me to click the install icon and install ubuntu without a DVD drive. Other things? Get in and retrieve data off corrupt OS’s before you blow them away. Allow people to test drive linux on their machines.

Will I ever make use of this? Actually I have no idea. It’s still cool that you can even do it. Maybe something to demo at the next DemoCampGuelph?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.