bootable 4 GB Flash Drive containing a portable version of Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available from Mandriva for 79 EUR ($89) and from Amazon for $94. The general idea is that you can take this little memory stick with you and be able to run Linux from it, do Internet and Office tasks with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and save your files to the free space on the drive. The Mandriva system can access Windows volumes, and the free space on the flash drive can be read from Windows.

I tried this device out on the two computers I have at home, a fairly new Compaq Presario V6000 laptop, and a 5-year-old Compaq Evo desktop. After some configuration issues, it worked fairly well on the new laptop. It was unusable on the old desktop, which barely met the minimum hardware requirements, although it's possible that with some tweaking it might be made to work better.

The first hurdle to using Mandriva Flash on any machine is getting the computer to boot from the flash drive.

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