Hi, Scylla - sorry about that - I'm not as conscientious about checking my messages as I should be.

With a flash drive as big as that, I'd look seriously at a "persistent install."

One of the annoyances of a live CD/flash drive is that it doesn't save what you've done during a session. OK, you can save documents to another drive, but it's hard work.

This article looks interesting:

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-install-linux-usb-flash-drive

In fact, I'm inclined to give it a try once I've worked out just how to do it.

A couple of points:

If you actually install a distro to a flash drive, then it will probably only really work satisfactorily with the specific computer to which it was installed (hardware settings and all that.)

A full install to any drive can lead to a minor bother mentioned last night. The installer will look at your existing hard drive, decide you want to dual boot and let you install GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) to your hard drive's Master Boot Record. It will typically point the MBR to the other GRUB files offering boot options - and which is stored on the same drive (eg your flash drive) as your new distro.

This means that if you start your computer without the flash drive plugged in, you'll get an irritating error message saying that GRUB can't find its boot files (and therefore your hard drive installation - XP, or whatever you have.) Repairable, but tedious.

Additionally, a full install will write a swap file to your flash drive ("swap" being the Linux equivalent of the Windows "page file.") Flash drives don't really like the constant write/rewrites/reads that this involves, and won't last as long as they should.

So the answer seems to be a live CD type flash drive, but with the option to save any changes, documents and so on to the flash drive. It's worth the small delay every time it starts, waiting for it to re-detect hardware.

The other joy of this set-up would be that you can carry your flash drive with you and use it on any computer that will boot off a flash drive. Interesting possibilities for being able to use familiar settings/docs and the like on more than one machine.

Dream Linux offers a persistent install option on the live CD, but I found it rather unstable. It tended to persist hardware details from one computer to another - leading to a 7" Eee PC-type screen when I tried it on my 17" desktop.

But it looks as if it can be done with other distros, and I'm really sorely tempted to give it a go.

Scylla, if you have any joy with a persistent install to a flash drive, perhaps you could let us know how you did it? In the meantime, I'm going to do a little more reading, and give it a try, too. I don't know how durable the whole thing will prove, but really like the idea of being able to carry an operating system in my pocket, with all my documents and pictures and settings preserved on it no matter which computer I boot it on - if that's how it works...

Anyone else had any joy with a persistent install? It would be really useful to learn the details.