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From Linstick
LinStick is a Gentoo Linux based linux distribution that is around 200Mb in size fitting nicely on a 256Mb USB flash drive. If you are asking ... ok ... what's new? Imagine this ... same OS can be booted under windows as just another application and natively if the motherboard supports booting from the USB drive.
Download latest LinStick v0.2 linstick-0.2.zip (http://www.linstick.com/downloads/linstick-0.2.zip) (211Mb).
NOTE: Due to bandwidth restrictions - we cannot allow uncontrolled downloads of this big file. Please contact Nebojsa Djogo at djogon at softwareriver.com for username/password. If you would like to host this file for download - please let us know. Thanks!
To install onto your hard drive:
The contents of the ZIP archive MUST be extracted into a root of your drive. For example - extract the linstick-x.x.zip into your C:\ folder so that you end up with C:\fs\ and C:\fs\win when you are done.
Save any open files you may have. In one case - there was a complete system crash when trying to install coLinux driver uppon initialization. Since then linstick was moved from development to a stable coLinux branch.
Go into the C:\fs\win\ folder and double click on the startlinstick.exe application. This will start the boot process in the background - please be patient.
Same files can be moved to a USB memory stick and used in the same fashion. Make sure the files are extracted onto the root of your USB drive. If your drive letter is E: for example - make sure that after copying or extracting the files onto your USB drive - you end up with the E:\fs\ folder.
To boot directly from your USB stick
After you have followed the above to install the needed files onto your USB drive you have to make it bootable and copy some additional files to it.
Install the SYSLINUX bootloader onto your USB drive to make it bootable. You can obtain it here http://syslinux.zytor.com (http://syslinux.zytor.com/). Once you install syslinux - download linstick native boot files linstick-usb-boot-0.2.zip (3Mb) (http://www.linstick.com/downloads/linstick-usb-boot-0.2.zip) and unzip them into the root of your USB drive.
That's it - note that some motherboards will work better than others, some will require more fiddling, but generally SYSLINUX web site should have the answer to any booting questions.
