Peter's Blog

I recently bought a new USB Memory thingy, a Corsair Voyager 4G, to replace a rather nice verbatim that I had for about a month before I lost it (with important files on ). I fancied a rugged replacement that I could put on my keyring. Some research told me that the most rugged are reputedly Corsair and Sandisk. The comments on Amazon.co.uk revealed people moaning about their Sandisks and being very happy with their Corsairs so I bought the latter. The Sandisks come with some invasive 'feature' called U3 which can be a particularly annoying piece of tat-you-didn't-ask-for. The Corsair comes with some cryptographic thing if you happen to be between the I-need-encryption and the all-encryption-systems-have-government-backdoors levels of paranoia.

It seems rugged enough as it has a rubberised finish which feels rather unpleasant in the hand so I will not be inclined to keep fondling it in my pocket. Even better, the cap is rubber and so I won't be habitually clicking it. I would prefer a capless design but Corsair don't make one and then I would be fiddling with the cap mechanism. The rubber cap is downright unpleasant and I will only use it when necessary. The rubber seems to attract pocket lint

So I had a look around at the state of the art in Linuxes that boot from USB and I come across a little gem: DSL USB Embedded. DSL is Damn Small Linux and is an old 2.4 kernel and 50 megabytes of applications, a minimal system with hand-picked useful apps. The beauty of this particular distrbution is that it includes a QEMU virtual machine so you can be running windows, bung the USB memory in the hole, run a batch file and have your own linux running in a virtual machine under windows without having to install linux or reboot into a live CD. Amaze and bewilder your friends by running linux on their cruddy windows boxes! Remove your USB key and all traces of linux with it!

DSL USB Embedded

DSL USB Embedded under Vista with IE7 to prove it is Windows. It boots quite quickly too (less than a minute) which is much better than Ubuntu/Knoppix live CDs.

The USB key can also be set up to boot a pc straight into linux for some light Windows password resetting and it can have some persistant memory allocated to it should you not wish to cover your tracks.