I've just completed building up a live Ubuntu on USB key. Not tough really, the live CD has a utility for this.

Just feed it a .iso, and it builds your key.

My laptop is almost perfectly quiet. I have it running in low power mode, DVD drive and hard drive removed, and it's just silent! Battery looks to go almost 4 hours running this way.

...and it's virus free essentially. The USB key is write only, and I'm running a RAM root filesystem, meaning I can also just turn the machine off, with no worries. A secondary key inserted would let me save data, and applications I might need are online in the Ubuntu repository. Just ask for one, it downloads it, installs it, and you are off and running.

My machine is a T60p, and it's getting a new Linux, OS X, and XP. This little bit was to setup a diagnostic / repair environment for the three OS setup. Thought I would just check it out on the way through.

Why? Well, I've an app to support that runs on all three OSes, and the Lenovo machine runs them all nicely enough. I think it's going to be pretty darn kick ass.

Running a live Linux from a key is FAST. It's nearly as fast as local disk is, and I suspect I could get faster keys too. Not sure how quick this one is, but the lack of seek times really has an impact on things.

The quiet is amazing! I'm seriously considering a quickie home machine setup, with a low power CPU for a dead quiet home computer.

Boot time is 30 seconds, from cold power on to desktop. Perfectly respectable. Since it's stateless essentially, power off is three seconds --just long enough for the BIOS to just shut it down.

I'm using a 2GB key, and with the default Ubuntu live setup, there is about 400MB available. I could pack in a few more applications, remaster the key, and be pretty much set.

Saving data happens on another key, of course. Toss both of them on the keychain, and it's a portable compute environment that is very, very private and non-intrusive to other computing environments.

This, plus web based services and applications means being able to actually do a significant fraction of my work on this key. Sweetness.

"I'm using a 2GB key, and with the default Ubuntu live setup, there is about 400MB available. I could pack in a few more applications, remaster the key, and be pretty much set."

Quiet and fast boot...Bingo! A lot of folks don't understand why I like this Asus Eee 2G "surf" so much! It runs Xandros and has Firefox, Open office, Media players and a few games stuffed into the 2G!

OSX? won't the Apple folks object to that? or is that ok now?

Probably. I do a lot of stuff that people would object to. However, a lot of software and hardware gets sold because of it, and businesses run better because of it. They can't have their cake and eat it too.

Some Apple users are gonna see value added to their Apple purchase, and a software vendor is going to see their customer value perception improved. That's all not going to happen if I'm hobbled, so I don't worry about it.

Yeah, it's a sweet deal. From the looks of the battery depletion, it's more like 3 hours. Still pretty great though.