Boot into Linux! From a USB stick! Or Run a server on you USB! And run a wikipedia software from your stick! Backup your files! Play tetris! Fun and games for everyone!

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Create a Bootable USB Drive or Memory Card

Taking Puppy Linux for a Walk

Damn Small Linux

Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick

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Taking Puppy Linux for a Walk

Booting Linux from an external drive with the applications and settings of your choice has never been easier after this week's release of Puppy Linux 3.0. Like Damn Small Linux, Puppy is small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive, and like Knoppix , you can boot it from CD. Puppy can also add your favorite open source applications to the desktop and save multiple user profiles back to your writable CD or thumb drive, too. Let's take a look at how you can take your operating system, apps, data and user settings to go with Puppy Linux.

What You Can Do with Puppy

The two main uses for Puppy Linux (or any Linux live CD) are to:

• Rescue files from the host PC's hosed hard drive or perform various maintenance tasks (like imaging that drive)
• Compute on a machine without leaving a trace—like browser history, cookies, documents or any other files—behind on the internal hard drive

While there's a wide range of Linux live distro's available, Puppy Linux is a fantastic option which offers a full computing environment with rich graphical apps like the Mozilla Seamonkey suite, Word and Excel equivalents, calendar, chat and photo editors, too.

What You'll Need

Before we get started setting up Puppy Linux, you'll need:

• A CD or DVD burner
  
• Software that can burn an .ISO file to CD or DVD, like ISO Recorder
  
• A thumb drive (the roomier the better, 1GB recommended)
  
• A PC that can boot to CD or USB drive (check your system's BIOS for more, hit the Setup key noted during your computer's boot sequence)
  
• The Puppy Linux 3.0 .ISO file. Download it here. (Alternate location.)

Set Up and Boot Puppy Linux for the First Time

First burn the Puppy .ISO image to CD using ISO Recorder. (With ISO Recorder installed, just right-click the disk image to copy to CD.) Once your Puppy Linux CD is written, leave it in your CD drive, shut down your computer and restart. If your computer is set to boot from CD, Puppy Linux will start. (See step 2 listed here for more info on setting your computer to boot from CD if Windows starts up again, even with the Puppy CD inserted.)

When Puppy boots you'll have to answer a few questions before you see a desktop: what keyboard layout it should use (most likely the first choice, U.S.), and what video resolution it should use based on your video card and monitor. The video setting can be a bit hit or miss, but you can test the various options to find the one that works. (While I didn't have any trouble on a 5 year old Dell PC, at least one Lifehacker reader had a bit of trouble.) Once you start up X (Puppy's windowing system), you'll get a desktop that looks like this (click to enlarge):

Puppy doesn't automatically mount your thumb drives or connect to the network, you have to do that for it. As the instructions embedded on the desktop say, click on the Connect icon (just once, not twice!) to get your internet access set up. Here's what that looks like:

Here you see Puppy recognizes my one network interface—in this case, an Ethernet connection, eth0. Clicking on that and hitting the "Auto DHCP" button got me online immediately, and I could use the built-in browser and chat client.

You don't have to set up your network connection every time you boot Puppy. Once you've acquired an IP address, Puppy will ask you if you want to save the settings for your next session. (More on session info saving below.)

The other thing you'll want to do is mount your thumb drive, which Puppy also does not do by default. Click on the Drives icon, then select your flash drive (which should be plugged in, if not, do so and then click Refresh).

Save Your Puppy Linux Settings to Writable CD or USB Drive

Once you've got your initial setup complete, shut down Puppy to save your settings either to your USB drive—or if you left your CD-R session open, to CD. When you shut down Puppy it will ask you if and where to save your session, which you'll also be able to give a custom name.

Next time you boot up Puppy with the USB drive plugged in (or from that writable disk), it will automatically detect your session settings and the desktop will no longer have the initial run wallpaper included. It will look more like this (click to enlarge):

From here you can further customize your Puppy session (use multiple workspaces, set your desktop background, timezone, shortcuts, etc.) To save your session at any point to thumb drive, click once on the "Save" icon.

Add Applications to Puppy Linux

Puppy comes with a stunning array of rich desktop applications to start with (do explore the menu to check 'em out), but not all of them might be familiar to you. Luckily you can add your familiar favorites using Puppy's package manager, its answer to Windows Install Wizard. From the Menu's Setup area, launch the PETget package manager and pick and choose the apps you want to add to puppy. (Click to enlarge screenshot):

Here you can see I'm adding Firefox, Thunderbird, the Gimp, OpenOffice.org and an interesting looking money manager called PuppyMoney. It's a virtual software buffet!

Booting and Saving to Only a USB Drive

Sadly my old PC doesn't have the ability to boot from a USB flash drive, but yours might. To ditch the optical disk entirely, install Puppy to a USB drive using the universal installer (located in the Menu's Setup area.) There you can install Puppy to the media of your choice:

More Puppy Help and Resources

While I've only scratched the surface of getting started with Puppy, to dive in deeper, check out the copious documentation and tutorials available, like:

• Puppy Linux Video Tutorials (these are especially helpful)
  
• The Puppy Linux Documentation Project
  
• Puppy Linux Forums
  
• Quick Start Guide to Using Puppy

You give Puppy 3.0 a try? Let us know how it went in the comments.

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Create a Bootable USB Drive or Memory Card

UNetbootin allows you to easily adapt a Linux CD image to boot off of a USB flash drive or memory card. Have a system without a CD drive? Create a bootable USB drive to run your Linux installer.

I used this method to create an Ubuntu 8.04.1 live SD card. The process required just over 700 MB of space on the card.

UNetbootin’s website offers a statically-linked binary download for Linux systems. This means you don’t need to install it. Download UNetbootin for Linux using the link on the top of the application’s site.

Mark the downloaded file as executable using the command line, or by opening its properties and selecting Allow executing in the Permissions tab. You can run the application on the command line or by double clicking the file.

If you get errors about missing some dependencies, exit UNetbootin and install them before continuing. I had to install mtools and p7zip-full (click the links to install):
sudo apt-get install mtools p7zip-full

UNetbootin should start now without any warnings.

Select the Diskimage option and browse to your source ISO file. In the Drive dropdown box, double check that your desired USB flash drive or memory card is selected. For example, if you want to check if /dev/sde1 is your flash drive, run this command:
mount | grep /dev/sde1

Among the output from that command should be the location where /dev/sde1 is mounted currently.

Click OK and wait while UNetbootin works. Click Exit once the process is finished, and eject your drive. You should now be able to boot off of it on any system capable of USB boots.

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Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick

You don't have to lease server space or keep your home computer always on to access a personal web server—you can run a web, FTP, and database server straight from a USB drive. A slim web server package called XAMPP fits on a USB stick and can run database-driven webapps like the software that powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki. Almost two years ago you learned how to set up your "personal Wikipedia" on your home web server to capture ideas and track document revisions in a central knowledge repository. Today we'll set up MediaWiki on your flash drive for access on any Windows PC on the go.

A word on security: The XAMPP web server package is intended for web developers to use while building web sites, so by default, the passwords are blank and configuration is not secure. Running server software opens up a port on your computer, which in and of itself is a security risk. Getting this set up requires getting your hands dirty editing configuration files. If you're not comfortable with the risks and implications of this solution but still want your own wiki, I highly recommend the free, hosted, PBWiki. Also check out the nifty TiddlyWiki for a less setup-intensive wiki-on-a-thumb-drive alternative.

Still with me? Let's get your personal wiki running on a thumb drive.

What You'll Need

In order to get your personal Wikipedia running on your thumb drive, you'll need:

• A Windows XP PC with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Ultimate
  
• A thumb drive with at least 150MB free. The bigger your drive, the more data you can store on it so go as big as you can here.

Install and Start XAMPP

Download the XAMPP Lite .EXE installer from here. Double-click on the file to extract it, and choose your flash drive's drive letter as the destination (not a subfolder.) A folder called xampplite will be created on your thumb drive.

(Note: I chose XAMPP Lite because it offers everything we need to run MediaWiki, and it's smaller in size than XAMPP. But XAMPP is updated more often than XAMPP Lite, and you can install add-ons with full-on XAMPP, so it may be a consideration if you want to do more than just run MediaWiki on your thumb drive.)

Once XAMPPLite is saved to your flash drive, to start it up, double-click on the xampp-control.exe file in the xampplite directory. That will launch XAMPP's Control Panel, which lets you start all the services you need.

To run MediaWiki, you need two services: Apache web server, and the MySql database server. Click the Start button next to each of those in the XAMPP Control Panel, as shown.

When you hit the Start button, your system's firewall may ask whether or not it should allow incoming and outgoing connections to the software. Allow it.

Now your portable web server is up and running. To see it in action, in your web browser, visit http://localhost/. Click on your language of choice—by default, XAMPP Lite's English homepage looks like this.

The first thing we want to do is set up a few passwords to secure your servers. Click on the "Security" link on the sidebar (by default, located at http://localhost/security/. You'll see that by default, all of XAMPP's settings are marked as insecure. Click on the link below the security table to "fix" the problems (by default, http://localhost/security/xamppsecurity.php.) On this next page, set your MySql database password for the root user. If you choose, you can set a password for visiting any web page as well, as shown.

To enable the new MySQL password, switch to the XAMPP Control Panel, stop MySql, and start it again.

Install and Configure MediaWiki

Now that your web and database server is up and running, it's time to install the MediaWiki wiki software. Download the latest version of MediaWiki from here (as of this writing, the file name is mediawiki-1.11.1.tar.gz.) Extract the files (first gunzip, then tar, the free 7-Zip utility can do this for you), and by default they'll be stored in a folder called mediawiki-1.11.1. Rename this folder simply wiki and move it to your thumb drive in XAMPP's xampplite\htdocs\ folder. When you're done, if your thumb drive's letter is G:\, the full path to the MediaWiki files would be G:\xampplite\htdocs\wiki\.

To configure MediaWiki, visit http://localhost/wiki/. Click on the link to configure your wiki. There you can keep all the default settings except:

• You must enter the name of your wiki. Mine is "GinaWiki."
• You must enter a wiki administrator name (by default, WikiSysop) and password.
• Enter your database information. The database name can stay wikidb, but change the DB username to root and enter the password you set up above.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the "Install MediaWiki!" button to save your settings. When the installation is complete, MediaWiki will prompt you to move the LocalSettings.config.php file up a directory on your thumb drive. Go ahead and do that. You're moving the file from
G:\xampplite\htdocs\wiki\config\LocalSettings.php
to
G:\xampplite\htdocs\wiki\LocalSettings.php.

Finally, visit http://localhost/wiki/ to see your fresh new MediaWiki installation in action, as shown below. Congratulations!

From here you can start editing and adding pages, creating user accounts and even uploading files to your new wiki.

But first, two helpful customizations will make your new wiki easier to use.

• Make your wiki the default start page. When you visit your local server, you might want your wiki's home page to appear first instead of XAMPP's homepage. To do that, open the index.php file in XAMPP's htdocs directory in a text editor. Change the line that reads: header('Location: '.$uri.'/xampp/'); to header('Location: '.$uri.'/wiki/'); and save it. Now, when you visit http://localhost/, you'll go directly to your wiki.
• Add a custom wiki logo. To add your own logo to the upper left hand side of your wiki install, create a 135x135 pixel image, name it mywikilogo.png, and save it to H:\xampplite\htdocs\wiki\skins\common\images where H: is your thumb drive's letter. Then, open the H:\xampplite\htdocs\wiki\LocalSettings.php file in a text editor and add the following line: $wgLogo = "/wiki/skins/common/images/mywikilogo.png"; Save the file, and refresh your wiki in the browser. You should now see your custom logo. (Note: the logo doesn't have to be a PNG file; substitute your image's extension, like JPG or GIF.)

Stopping and Starting Your Wiki

When you're finished using your wiki, invoke the XAMPP Control Panel running in your system tray. Click the Stop button next to Apache, then click the Stop button next to MySql. Once the servers have stopped, click the Exit button. You can now eject your thumb drive as usual. Remember: don't try to eject your thumb drive before stopping the services; doing so can blue screen your PC and possibly screw up your wiki and server installation.

To start up your wiki at a new computer, plug in your thumb drive, and double-click on the xampp-control.exe file to start the Control Panel. From there, start the Apache and MySql servers, then visit http://localhost/ to edit your wiki.

Why a personal Wikipedia?

A wiki is an incredible collaborative tool for groups of people, but it's also a great one-stop shop for your own personal "stuff I want to remember"—like ideas, drafts, lists, and bookmarks. If you haven't edited Wikipedia or just want to see what MediaWiki can do, here's a quick demonstration of what writing a novel draft would be like using the software and its special Wikitext markup.

More Portable Web Servers

XAMPP isn't the only portable web server on the block. Another free portable server package called Server2Go includes Perl 5.8. Thanks, Vijay!

What do you do with your key chain web server? Let us know in the comments.