Bootable Linux Thumb Drive - free software download or buy preloaded thumbdrive

[rugby1]

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

-or-

www.goosee.com/puppy

[danny_galaga]

so with linux mame this is the perfect mamers tool! no hard drive or cd drive noise. and the insides of your machine looks just that bit more 'arcade' like (",)
nice.

[rugby1]

Hopefully,  I haven't downloaded it yet and tried it.  Will give it a shot this weekend or early next week....   it takes up 50 MB of your thumbdrive though.... add linux mame and you might not have a whole lot of room for roms on your thumbdrive... not a problem if you only want a handful of games but big problem if you have the entire set of roms.  Thumb drives will get bigger in size though....   just starting to see the 2 Gig drives at a reasonable price. 

[Grasshopper]

You could also try AdvanceCD. That can also be booted from a Thumb Drive.

http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/cd-readme.html

[eightbit]

I've used DSL, its pretty impressive for a 50mb footprint and for it running off a cd. Never tried mame on it though.

There are lots of guides out there how to make a thumb drive bootable. Its not that hard. I definately wouldn't spend extra money for a pre-loaded one.

[rugby1]

Yeah, I already own a 1 Gig thumb drive so I can't see paying for another one which is preloaded .....  I would buy a preloaded one though if I didn't already own one.   

[grumble]

Speaking of Thumb Drives, I noticed that Best Buy was selling 1Gb Memorex thumb drives for $49 the other day.
As for DSL; I was really impressed with it. It's surprisingly useful and very easy to install and modify to your needs.

[markb]

When the price hits about

[Grasshopper]

Be aware though that not all motherboards are capable of booting from a USB drive, especially the older ones.

Yes, booting from USB still seems to be a bit hit or miss with many motherboards. It's amazing how primitive most BIOSes still are.

When I upgraded my motherboard's BIOS a while back I noticed that boot from USB-FDD and USB-ZIP options had been added but they don't appear to work and Asus' technical support is a joke.

As a temporary solution I've managed to set up a simple dual boot system so that the AdvanceCD kernel is booted from hard disk and then all the files are accessed from the thumb drive in the normal way. Not ideal but it will do until I eventually upgrade my motherboard.

Another alternative is to get a CF card and buy one of these adapters.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Compact-Flash-CF-to-IDE-adapter-2-backpanel-ver_W0QQitemZ5859539646QQcategoryZ41994QQcmdZViewItem

I bought one a couple of weeks ago but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Theoretically it should be faster than a thumb drive. The only real downside is that the CF cards are not hot-pluggable.