I've always wanted Linux on a thumb drive ever since I heard about it. These days you can get it pre-installed from Mandriva on a 4GB thumb drive, or you can follow a number of how-tos devoted to creating your own. I followed the reasonably easy directions for installing Mint on a USB stick on Pendrivelinux. They have instructions and tools for a number of distributions besides Mint, and they even have their own Debian-based image that you can dd to a thumb drive under Linux.

The Pendrivelinux tool and directions for Mint, however, are for creating a Mint thumb drive under Windows. That's right, Windows. I had toyed with the idea of creating a bootable Ubuntu thumb drive using directions from the same site, but after comparing the Ubuntu directions with the Mint directions, I opted for Mint. The Ubuntu directions were complicated and long. And being tired at the end of the weekend I wasn't in any mood to follow complicated (and possible incorrect) directions. Yes, I was lazy.

The Pendrivelinux directions tell you to download the Mint ISO and save it somewhere on your hard drive. Well, I had more than enough space to actually put it on the 4GB stick, and I already had the ISO, having downloaded it when it was first released and burned it to CD. So I plugged the Cruzer Micro into my Linux system and prepared to transform it.

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