Distro for a 4GB flash drive

[Raccoon1400]

Somebody a couple pages ago suggested Dreamlinux. I tried 4 times, and couldn't get the drive to boot. I formated the drive with fat16, fat32, ext2, ext3. Think it might reformat the drive anyway. With the fat filesystems, gparted didn't know what the fs type was after installation. With the ext fs, gparted at least knew the fs type, etx2/3. It still wouldn't boot. I just got a cursor flashing in the corner. When I used ext3, it created two ext partitions and a swap.

Trying the PCLOS usb install next.

[Raccoon1400]

PCLinuxOS appears to be a success. I used the usb HD install on the live cd It took 1.5 hours to copy the files, probably due to the fact I used an 800MHz PC with usb 1.1 or 1.0 ports.
I only had to change X11 drivers to get it working on my laptop. The laptop be will use at the cottage shouldn't be a problem, since both laptops are DELL and just over a year apart in age.
I did have to play with the partition table the install gave me, since / was full.
Almost working fine.

PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu are the most reliable distros I have used.

[stream303]

It's the same thing but Ubuntu doesn't come with that as a standard option like Knoppix does, because Ubuntu is mainly a distro intended for installing to hard disk, compared with Knoppix which is a distro primarily intended to be run from a CD or DVD.

Thanks for the information - quite informative. I agree with you here; even though both can be used as live-cd's, I tend to use knoppix in a temporary situation, or maybe at most in persistent mode and never as a permanent hard drive install. Ubuntu can fill the live role too, but obviously the strength is for permanent installs.

I think it comes down to a matter of convenience for me in regards to Knoppix for a temporary run. I took the long way to install the dvd version of it on an 8gb usb stick manually, when all I could have done was to run

mkbootdev

and it would have done it for me automatically. Live and learn.

What I found interesting was that I made some modifications to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to force it into a 16:9 mode for 1680x1050 and some other small tweaks, and this was remembered in persistent mode on the usb pendrive. I didn't expect that and was pleasantly surprised. As an Apple PPC user, I'm no stranger to manually modifying xorg.conf, even in Hardy.

Again, thanks for the info - that cleared up a few things I wasn't sure of.

[pluckypigeon]

enough already