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A PC in your pocket
Escrito por Administrator   
Martes 21 de Octubre de 2008 13:49
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Let's say the recession has hit you so hard that you've had to pawn your computer. Do you have to give up your cyber-personality? Absolutely not! here I tell you how you can have pretty much the same capability built into a simple USB flashdrive, which can take over a host computer and make it do what you want, without it being able to do anything about it.

It may also come in handy if you suspect your computer is bugged or has a virus. . . or simply you can't stand Windows anymore. . . .

 

In this article I'm going to tell you about two things: how to set up an independent operating system that will run from a USB drive, and how to load it with apps that will do exactly what they would do in Windows (because many of them *are* windows applications).

 

A computer in your pocket

In order to convert any PC (or Mac, for that matter) into your own machine, you need to boot it from scratch with an operating system that you carry in your USB drive. There are a few (fairly crippled) versions of Windows XP and Vista that claim to do that, buttoday the only operating system that can claim such a feat is Linux. The problem is finding a version of Linux that will play nice with someone who is not a total Linux expert (insert appropriate adjective, if desired). I've spent way too much time trying different Linux distributions and these are a mere sample of the many possibilities. Most of them are deal with in good detail at pendrivelinux.com.

The problem is, Linux was also built to run from a hard drive, and the majority of the kinds of Linux that will install to a flashdrive have one of these two problems:

  1. They will not save your work after you're done (this is called "being persistent"); all CD-based distributions have this problem.
  2. Or if they do, they'll treat your flashdrive like a hard disk, accessing it frequently, and making work slow and painful.

But fear not, because I've finally found one distribution that will install fast, run fast, and on too of that is persistent. It is called Puppy Linux, and it performs this feat by loading itself almost completely into main memory as it boots. Puppy Linux is the creation of Barry Kauler, a programming genius from Australia. You can download the latest version from here.

Puppy Linux is not only very small, fast, and good looking, but in its latest version (4.2.1 is already out) it does a great job of handling all the hardware in the computer, without having to look for drivers. maybe it won't run graphics-intensive games, but pretty much any Linux application can be handled. Add some Wine ("Windows Is Not Emulated," more on this later), and then you can run just about anything.

For those who want to build their own puppy, here's what you need to do, step by step (if you'd just prefer to get a puppy where everything is already set to go, skip to the next section):

  1. Download Puppy Linux from the website above or google a torrent for the same; also get lit2.pet from here or here; burn the Puppy Linux iso file to a CD; boot the computer from the CD.
  2. Get a USB flash drive (1GB or larger; they're getting cheaper every day), and plug it in. If it's not new (or even if it is) run "Gparted" from the "System" menu and select that drive. You want to make it a FAT or FAT32 primary partition, with the "boot" flag set.
  3. Run the "Puppy universal installer" from the "Setup" menu and direct it to the USB drive; take all the defaults and recommended settings as they are offered. Puppy Linux will copy the CD into the flash drive, and will set it to boot from it.
  4. Restart the computer (if restarting from the menus, tell Puppy Linux that you don't want to save your session) and set the BIOS, as it starts to boot, to boot from the USB drive first (remove the CD, to make sure).
  5. Now Puppy Linux will start from the flash drive, being an identical copy of the CD, but faster. You can add more software now. I recommend some good old Wine at this point, which you can get, along with a bunch of other stuff, if you install LIT2 first.
  6. To do that, click on the drive where you saved lit2.pet (all drives are listed at the bottom of the screen, so you'll find it sooner or later, even though their names have changed), and then click on lit2.pet when you see it (puppy in a box). Lit2 will install automatically, and will be visible in the "Setup" menu after doing a "Restart JWM" from the "Shutdown" menu.
  7. For Lit2 or the Puppy software manager to fetch some more programs, you need to connect to a network. Click on the "Connect" icon on the left side of the screen and follow the prompts until you get it working (ethernet is usually no sweat, usually involving selecting "eth0" and then clicking on "Auto DHCP", wireless is a little harder to get going). Now that Internet is active, click on Lit2 and follow the links to download Wine and the other stuff. You want packages in .pet format, which will install with a click, just as Lit2 did.
  8. Once Wine is installed, you should be able to run a lot of Windows programs from Puppy Linux. Try some from the computer hard drives (assuming it runs Windows).
  9. The final touch: click on the icon representing your flash drive and make directories for your documents (so they are also accessible from other operating systems, without rebooting) and some windows programs you'd like to have. I'm telling you where to find them in the next section.
  10. One last word: the first time you shut down (you actually have to select it twice in the Shutdown menu, as a safety), you'll be asked how big a file you want, to save your session. The larger, the better, but remember that this will leave you less space (visible to other operating systems) to put files and Windows programs. If you choose a size that causes you to run out of space with Linux programs later on, you have an item in the "Utility" menu to make it bigger (cannot be made smaller, though). Puppy Linux will take a little time shutting down the first time, but it will be a lot faster after that.

All right, so you want a puppy that can run Windows programs, including graphically intensive games, and fits in a USB stick? Then look no further than Tipsy Puppy (a puppy with so much wine built into it, that the poor thing is all wobbly), now in version 4.1.3. You can get it from here. The link will download an ISO file, which you must burn into a CD, using any CD-burning program. Then boot the computer from the CD. If you want to put it in a USB stick, there is a "puppy universal installer" in the menus that will allow you to do that. The first time you run it, Tipsy Puppy will ask you about the video card in your computer. If you get it right, you should be able to see nice desktop effects (through a program called "compiz") and run graphics-intensive games and other programs.

You can see some screenshots and download links, plus more info about Tipsy Puppy in this page.

Applications to go

Now that you have the equivalent of a computer in your pocket, you need to give it something to run. Puppy Linux includes a Word-compatible word processor (Abiword), an Excel-compatible spreadsheet (Gnumeric) and a whole lot of other stuff despite its incredibly small size, but we can still do better. What if you are in too much of a hurry to reboot from the flash drive, or the computer (or the owner) doesn't let you?

Unfortunately, Windows applications these days have acquired the habit of recording lots of things in something called "the registry" and placing parts of themselves in the Windows folder and other places. Many applications just cannot be copied onto a flash drive and expected to run elsewhere after that. But many can, and many that originally couldn't are being made "Portable" by developers.

  • You can find a lot of them in portableapps.com. You'll find office suites, programming languages, utilities, the works! Check the forums for even more applications.
  • Another place to look at is Wikipedia. The list has a lot in common with portableapps.com, but there are many different packages.
  • In the third place is pendriveapps.com, (a sister website to pendrivelinux.com), with a lot of other applications.
  • And then, there is the underworld. You can find even more applications (not all of them legal, beware) in places like portableappZ, ddl2, or your friendly neighborhood torrent portal.

I have a whole set of them in the same flash drive as Puppy Linux, so they are available when I plug it into a computer running Windows. I can also run them after booting Puppy Linux, thanks to Wine. I have a menu system that pops up when the drive is plugged in, based on Pstart, which can be edited easily. The menu loads automatically because the flash drive has a file called "autorun.inf" containing the following (copy and paste into notepad or similar, then save as text):

[Autorun]
Open=PortableApps\Pstart\Pstart.exe
Action=Start PortableApps
Icon=PortableApps\Pstart\Pstart.exe
Label=PortableApps

This, of course, assumes that you installed Pstart in a folder called Pstart, inside another folder called PortableApps. Change what needs to be changed if you put it elsewhere.

Good luck with the PC in your pocket!

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