Very interesting question:

[Jason Clinton]

I just bought the last of the 256mb USB flash drives for $79 from
Microcenter.

I had an interesting idea and I need your help filling in the holes:

The drive is /fast/. Fast enough to use as a root partition. So, I
frequently go on computer-help visits to different people I know and
there are some really great utilities at the standard Linux console that
would be indespensible to have when troubleshooting a Windows problem
like cfdisk, lspci, df, dd -- just access to /proc is useful.  USB flash
disks are bootable. The appear as a SCSI hard drive to Linux. The can be
partitioned and formated to any file system. Here is what I want to do:

Divide the drive in half. Make one half a bootable Linux partition with
lots of useful command line utilities. Install grub as the bootloader.
Put a FAT32 partition on the second half with things like Mozilla 1.3,
JRE 1.4.1_02, and OpenOffice on it with some space left over for
whatever I want to take back and forth.

I have figured out how to partition it; format it in FAT32 and reiserfs
for the respective partitions; install the bootloader. I've confirmed
that most modern computers can boot from it. Here's what I don't know:

* What is the best way to get 128mb of the best of the Linux
console in to that space?
* Should I start with a boot floppy distro and build up?
* What about building my own from a Slackware or Gentoo distro
(compiling for i386 generic)? (If so, how can I build on my system
and install to the flash drive?)
* Are there any bootable distros that you have a recommendation for?
* Is there anything I've overlooked in my brainstorming?
* Will any version of Windows have any trouble skipping over the
reiserfs partition and hot mounting the FAT32 partition?

--
Jason Clinton
I don't believe in witty sigs.