Damnsmallinux

Anyone here ever played with DSL? Was thinking of putting it on a USB drive to run BOINC inside windoze to see how it works.

I haven't done that one, but I ran full blown Linux Mint Xfce on a 32G USB drive for a while. In fact, I did it on multiple machines ... I had them on powered USB hubs and I did dual boot by turning the hub on or off remotely. It worked very well. The only caveat is when you do the install don't select typical. Do a custom install and limit the swap space to something like 1Gb. You won't be hybernating or putting it to sleep and you probably won't be needing more memory than the computer has.

NOTE: UEFI will not allow you to boot from a USB drive automatically. You have to enter your BIOS and select it right after it POSTS. Machines before UEFI can just change the boot order in BIOS so it picks up the USB OS if it is available.

Thanks Brian. If I do this it will be on a server with no UEFI bios. These was a distro of Linux that had BOINC as part of the install that I ran years ago on USB drives at WCG. Worked great until I tried to run the CEP1 project because it was Linux only in the beginning. Killed the drives dead. :rolleyes:

If this is something you intend to do for an extended period then you might want to consider using a external USB HDD instead of the USB stick. The memory sticks aren't really designed for the stresses of a complete OS running BOINC 24/7. Meaning they have a limited number of read/write cycles. Actually the HDD and everything else also have a limited number of R/W cycles, but the number is much bigger =))