I considered this for a while, but I just can’t seem to find computers that can boot directly off USB (when the BIOS isn’t locked up, I guess we do have competent admins). CD-ROM, HDD and Network are almost always there but that’s usually it. Even my most recent motherboard in my gaming PC can’t do it, although it’s about 4 years old now, and wasn’t exactly high-end at the time.

I actually thought about installing an “apt-getable” linux distribution (Debian, or Ubuntu to save me some hassles) instead of the small OSs available. 8 GB USB disks cost around 20€ and it’s plenty to host the OS, my usual packages and quite a bit of files. Are there any benefit in using these special distributions other standard Live-CDs converted to USB disks ?

@ Andrey:

Yeah, that dynamic module thing is quite unique. I haven’t seen it implemented this way anywhere else. Thant said, I’ve seen live distros that run entirely from RAM.

@ Andreas:

I guess it’s a matter of convenience. It’s probably easier to mount them early on, than have to user worry about doing it himself.

Also, I thought that it only indexes them and shows them as available without actually mounting. It mounts when you double click on the drive and try to access it. I might be wrong about this – I will double check. If it does mount them automatically that’s a little iffy, but not a deal breaker for me.

I was quite surprised that slax mounted all available partitions on the host machine. Crikey – that’s the last thing I want when running on someone elses hardware!

You have not yet discovered my favorite Slax feature! “Slax can run totally from RAM” plus “modules can be loaded and unloaded anytime” equals “you have as much software as you need and still work totally from RAM”.

Never seen that combo elsewhere, but I am not a distro hopper.