Hands on: Install Linux with a USB stick

Those of us who have used computers for a few years will remember the days when installing an operating system involved the lengthy task of inserting a number of floppy disks to get the job done.

The earliest versions of Linux, such as Slackware and Red Hat Linux, had to be installed this way and, because of space limitations, it was necessary to download different bootable floppy images depending on the kind of hardware the PC used.

Thankfully, those days are long over, and now the norm for Linux, as well as Windows and OSX, is to install from a CD or DVD. A further development is the live CD –­ a bootable CD (or DVD) image that allows you to go straight into the operating system without having to install a thing. You’ll regularly find some of the latest popular distributions on PCW cover discs, many of which can be booted, tried or installed in this way.

With the popular take-up of USB Flash drives (also known as sticks), it seems a natural progression to move to these media for installation, and Linux is taking the lead. Not only can some distributions work as a ‘live USB stick’, from where you can boot, run and install the operating system, but some take full advantage of the fact that these devices are, unlike CDs, not read-only and allow you to store data persistently between reboots.

In other words, they act similarly to traditional hard disks, save for the smaller capacity and greater portability.

Another major benefit of using these over CDs is speed –­ a USB stick can have your PC booted in less than a minute. Furthermore, CD writing is somewhat prone to error, and many discs become faulty if they get scuffed; a number of readers email about problems with installations that are due ultimately to bad CD writes.

As they are still a fairly recent development ­ – USB sticks have until recently been too small in capacity for it to be feasible –­ few distributions as yet offer full support for running from these sticks. One notable exception is Fedora 9, which supports running the operating system and gives you the capability to save your files.

Several readers have emailed to ask how to go about setting up a bootable USB stick; it’s not as complicated as you might think. The installation is non-destructive, as any files that are already on your stick will be untouched, and you can still access the drive in any operating system as usual.