I shuffled over to Amazon last week and made the mistake of signing in. I’ve bought so much stuff from that company that they have a profile on my buying and surfing habits that pins me down so well I might as well just give them my credit cards. Sure enough, the landing page was crammed with Xubie-targeting porn. I scrolled through quickly in the hope that my earlier decision to switch off Opera’s smooth scrolling would blur the candy on show but unfortunately, I caught a glimpse of a USB flash drive whizzing past. Backing up, it turned out to be a Bytestor ‘data faery’ 8GB USB stick for £9.99 including delivery. that’s 8GB for a tenner. 8GB. A tenner. Seriously. Not only that but it’s ‘turbo’ or ‘hyper’ fast or something. That is, it purports to be faster in some way.

So I got thinking. A tenth of a second later, I bought it. My idea was simple – get the goodness of Xubuntu running off flash at work and ditch the 120GB SATA disk (actually, use it to separate some of the VMs on the VM server – it’s all about spindle speed you know). I figured it’s got to be faster – and greener. Look, forget about the filthy diesel cargo ship which brought my completely unnecessary purchase all the way from the other side of the planet and the filthy diesel truck that brought it to my semi-geeky hands – It’s justified because it has no moving parts. How cool is that? And – if that wasn’t enough – I can run it on any box that can boot from USB – that is, I can run it on any 32 bit box which can boot from a USB disk. [Wonders what happened to the much hyped 64 bit revolution.]

I’ve long read about running Linux from a stick but never thought it was actually possible. With the advent of super-cheap flash drives and their plummeting costs accelerated by the handy world-crippling-all-our-children-will-hate-us-and-will-probably-have-to-live-in-a-post-apocalyptic-rat-eating-hell credit crunch suddenly, running everything including the kitchen sink that is your home directory seemed not so Star Trek after all.

Got the stick, surprisingly didn’t need a blowtorch to get through the packaging and I was away. Booted up Xubuntu 8.10 live disc, installed the giblets as advised by pendrivelinux.com and installed the weird ’squashfs’ and ‘Caspar loop’ goodness. Rebooted the box, pfaffed about with the Phoenix advanced BIOS junk for a while and bang! I had Xubuntu running from a USB stick. I installed the Nvidia proprietary drivers (gits) and a few bits and bobs, rebooted and Jiminy Cricket it worked. And it was fast. I mean, really fast. Twice as fast as the SATA. It’s like a new PC! With 3GB of RAM and 8GB of USB sitting on a cheapo albeit relatively new Intel Celeron I’ve got a flipping quick PC in my pocket. It is possible! I’m telling you now – the euphoria hasn’t stopped – how sad is that?