Puppy will easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media.The mission statements of Puppy Linux are (copied from the site): I've chosen Puppy Linux, because it's flexible, it simply works and because it 'feels good'. A lot of them could be used for our purpose. There are a lot of medium sized Linux distributions out there. You don't have to download or install them yourself.) 2.1. Sixteen of them on a 1 GB Linux box and another sixteen on a 2 GB Windows box.) (Here you can see a two baskets full of puppies. (Here you can see QEMU-Puppy, running in QEMU-Puppy, which in turn runs on top of a (not visible) native Linux installation. (Here you can see QEMU-Puppy, running on top of a (not visible) native Linux installation.) The tricky part is trying to have the OS on your USB memory stick to be able to boot both natively and in a virtual machine. Now we have two OS's running concurrently on one machine! ALT-TAB is enough to hide your machine and get back to work. With such a virtual machine, we are able to boot our OS on top of the already installed OS.

A virtual machine, like QEMU, is cheap, light and easy to protect as well. The USB memory stick is cheap, light and easier to protect. But it's expensive, a physical burden and risky. To get rid of these disadvantages, you can carry your own machine as well, not just your OS and your applications and your settings and your user data. Third, booting from USB 'locks' the machine: It's either the already installed OS or your OS, not both at the same time. Second, if the machine does boot from USB, not all hardware is detected or configured properly, since the hardware 'changes' every day. First of all, not every PC is able to boot from USB. Just put everything on a USB memory stick and boot from it.Ī bootable USB memory stick has some disadvantages as well. Having a complete OS at hand, including applications and settings and user data would take away these constraints. You don't want to pollute a machine you borrowed. But most of the software needs to be installed, which is not easy, or possible, or desirable, or allowed on a lot of machines. If you don't want to depend on the installed software, you can put your own software on the memory stick as well. Being able to handle the files, depends on the installed software. If you have your files on your memory stick, you can take any machine and access those files. What the heck, carrying your OS and even your own machine on your memory stick would be the best! Carrying your applications as well would be even better.

Once upon a time, I realized that having your data on a USB memory stick wasn't exactly what I wanted.

Just borrow a PC, boot your own environment and return the PC unaffected. This OS can be booted natively, or on top of an other, already installed, OS. QEMU-Puppy is an OS and a set of applications on a USB memory stick.

How to run virtual pc puppy linux