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Good, Portable "Virtual" Linux Distro?
Prof. Nix writes "I have been given the opportunity to redesign the Linux course for the community college I work for. This course will be taking students from the 'What's Lee-nux?' stage to (hopefully) Linux+ Certifiable in about three to four months. However, one issue I haven't solved is finding a semi-stable, highly portable, and readily accessible platform the students may pound on, and have root access, independently of their peers. The powers-that-be have already vetoed any sort of server environment accessible from off campus. We've already tried live USB drives, but we ran into many issues with non-supported hardware on students' home computers. So I'm left with the idea of virtual machines run from flash drives. My ultimate goal is to have some sort of portable system that students can use with equal ease on lab systems and personal laptops — regardless of hardware. Preferably this system would be installable on a 4GB flash drive and run an Ubuntu- or Fedora-derived OS. So I ask the people who have been in the trenches a lot longer than I — what distros should I look at?"
I run an instance of XP (Ubuntu host) from an SD card no problem. It shouldn't matter what OS the image is, it should run fine.
Of course, you need to make sure that everyone has a thumb drive of sufficient size.
You can't even buy drives too small for this anymore.
The post is pretty much standard trolling, but have the moderators gone on crack too? That's like say "Let's learn to drive a car. Let's start by assembling the engine..." and this is less of a problem in the workforce than on a collection of random computers. Every serious IT department runs recommended configurations of hardware and software, you don't just throw parts together, slap an OS on it and hope it works. Some hardware works flawlessly under Linux, others is a paperweight with every variation in between. If you want to run Linux you get hardware that runs Linux and it's not that hard to find, it's more that some brands support open source and others don't. Running it on random hardware is only done by people who want Linux to fail so they can mock it or those that really want the pain of dark magic command-fu or a nasty assignment in C. I really would like to see it as one of the assigned tasks though - run Linux natively from a LiveCD and run through basic checks on what works and what doesn't. That could be rather helpful information to someone trying to find a Linux friendly computer and Linux friendly accessories.
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Let's be serious about this here: download Portable Virtualbox, install it on a thumb drive, install whatever distro makes sense for the class (given A+, probably CentOS, Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu) on the drive's VBox, and dd is your friend. Finished. Anyone who hoses the VM can get a fresh load.
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