5 Portable Operating Systems

These days,with our work taking us more and more outside the confines of simplicity and onto the big bad outside world, it makes sense to have a USB pen drive, or CD, with a nice portable Operating system. Why? for those aggravating crashes and other disobedience by the bundled Vista. This article could also be called alternatives to Windows Vista, but with a portable twist. And mainly, these OS are meant to be portable, that is boot directly and install, from any removable media like pen drive or optical CD, DVD etc. Reason for saying this is that Windows XP too can be made portable on a pen drive, but we need some utilities like Bart’s PE builder software and some geeky knowledge. A later article will cover this ‘XP on a pen drive’ topic.

These OS are basically used to rescue files from a crashed HDD installed OS (probably Windows), or make images of Hard drives, back up your files etc. but there are more things to it: they can be used for proper computing also, like text editing, chatting, graphics, net browsing etc.  These Linux based ones are really light and cool, check them out, and if there are any good ones we’ve missed, please mention (politely).

Damn Small Linux
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My personal favorite — this one is really damn small! It can fit into a 50 MB space, and boot from pen drive, CD etc. It started off as a personal project, then attracted a community and brains working in tandem, to actually successfully make a desktop oriented OS with enough applications for basic computing, even to act as a SSH/FTP/HTTPD server. Besides there is Firefox, a VNC viewer, file managers, instant messaging clients and more. Few of the application available are: Xpdf, an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files, a Window Manager called FluxBox, Ted (a text processor), XMMS (for MP3, CD Music, and MPEG) etc. Its free, but Donations are accepted