Testing Linux: PendriveLinux

We continue to review alternatives on how to test Linux and not die trying, we are going with an alternative that will not leave collateral damage on your machine if you send yourself a muddy one. Normally to do this type of test we resort to LiveCDs, which are CDs that we put in the computer so that they start at the beginning, the problem with them arises because as you might suppose, we cannot save anything on them and worse, our CD / DVD input it gets busy so we can't even use that session to watch a movie or listen to music.

Do you remember the first flash drives that were sold massively? They were very expensive, just spending on a 32 or 64 megabyte was so expensive compared to a CD that from my point of view it was not worth it. But today, a pendrive? cheap cheap, in fact, in most stores today pen drives of less than 1 GB are not sold and the latter cost less than 10 dollars (much less). I have 2, plus an mp3 and a microSD that I am thinking of changing for a new one; what I mean is that this of the pendrives and flash memories in general are today a thing to use and throw away.

In Linux, LiveCDs are giving rise to pendrives, they can boot the system by themselves and there are versions of almost any Linux distribution available to boot directly from them, however, all distributions are not made to be used like that, some are very large and they only fit in the largest ones, while others wear out the USB memory by writing and writing on it at all times.

pendrivelinux It could be one more of these adapted distributions, but, as its name suggests, it stands above the others in something: It was born for this. pendrivelinux It is based on Mandriva, one of those "beginner" distributions, it is made to be easily configured, without much knowledge, and it works.

Works! tm

Part of my blogging philosophy says in his fourth article, subsection 36 "If you are going to talk about something, try to have tried it before, please", when I don't I usually have problems; I have tried PendriveLinux and I can say it works, with qualms but it works.

If your computer is contemporary and you use Vista or XP, you will surely be surprised how fast PendriveLinux runs on your machine coming from a USB memory. Internet connection? If you use such a modem DHCP, you will most likely connect to the Internet alone (without even asking and without keys or passwords).

What are the objections?

Since we are talking about a USB stick and the idea is to maximize the use of space (if you saw the size of the office I work in you would know what I am talking about), anything that is not absolutely essential or standard should be put aside. For some obscure reason, the Internet connection never worked on my PC (for some stupid reason I complain about not being able to use it with Linux on the machine), but where the Internet didn't work either was with my brother's notebook with the Wifi connection (FayerWayer, WayerLess, one day I'm going to create WayFay (but first some of you are going to steal my idea and do it before me)). The Wi-Fi connection asks me to configure the card with «ndiswrapper», a driver that we will talk about in a while.

Personally I think that, adding and subtracting, the "objections" next to the benefits and the possibility of testing the benefits of Linux, there is nowhere to get lost. If you wanted to try this, go to the nearest store, buy one of those 1GB pendrives and dedicate it to try this.

Test Linux with PendriveLinux (2008 version)

• First things first, download the file that contains the distribution. pendrivelinux2008.
• When you have it, extract its content into the pendrive.
• Find the file "makeboot.bat" (because I assume you are using Windows) and run it. This makes your pendrive able to boot the computer later
• Now restart your computer and enter the BIOS with F2, F11, Del or the corresponding key on your PC, it is different in all of them and appears on the screen as soon as you turn on the computer
• Look for an option called "Boot" and you will surely find a list of your hard drive, CD-ROM and pendrive. Make the pendrive the first on the list, save and get out of there.
• As you will see, the system is going to restart, leave it alone that your pendrive, if it has not had any problem, it should be starting PendriveLinux.

This should be the best way to test Linux, but there is more. it's possible try this same system without restarting Windows, that is, using both in parallel. Short All In One Pendrive Linux 2008 and follow the steps above but DO NOT reboot, instead run "qemu.bat". If your PC has a decent amount of RAM you should not have problems running and using PendriveLinux within Windows, although of course, it is less functional than the previous one since it does not work in Vista and you cannot use the USB drive from Windows while using PendriveLinux because you can corrupt the file system and run out of a pendrive.

-> LINKS

• PendriveLinux.com