Bootable USB, finally

With the thumb drive rendered undetected after the last attempt using Kubuntu, I had to perform a low level format using the tool from hddguru.com. Since the tool is only for Windows, and I could not run it successfully in Wine, I had to go back to a system running XP to do the honours. Post low level format, as promised by HDDguru, the drive was back in action.

Since DSL was out of the race, I focussed on pendrivelinux itself, next. This was a 450 MB download, and no torrents were active at the time. I tried downloading it from the site, but got less than satisfactory download speeds. So rather than wait for the file to download I looked around for other options.

Puppylinux was the other distro that was hailed for its size - 90 MB and it also seemed to have a dedicated tool for installing to the USB drive. Downloaded and wrote a Live CD and booted into it.

Puppy inspite its size is a giant killer. A trendsetter of sorts, Puppy actually has meaningful user menu options that guide even the novice user through many esoteric steps through the booting process. It allows the user to select the graphics options, even offering a backup plan in case X failed. I was quite impressed with the userfriendliness of the distro. Unlike many other more popular distros I tested, Puppy was successful in loading the GUI in the native resolution.
It is more visually appealing than DSL, and has the SeaMonkey application suite compared to DSL's konqueror.
As promised ther was a tool to install to the Flash drive. Here too there are descriptive messages that hand hold the user through the entire process making it difficult to get something wrong. The first attempt failed, and on the second attempt I chose a different option suggested by Puppy. This time I was able to get a working bootable flash drive. The difference in the approaches was that in the first method the entire flash drive was formatted in ext2 and used, whereas in the second option the drive is divided into two partitions with one of them being a FAT16 file type for increased compatibility with Motherboard bioses.

Puppy was quite capable and I was taken aback by the extreme ease with which it installed my printer - while with opensuse I had to download the drivers. The wizard was HTML driven and hence devoid of the usual gloss, but it gets the job done quite well.

The drawbacks of Puppy which franky are heartbreaking were the absence of any really extensive repository. Or it could also be that I was unable to use it properly. The list of applications available are quite limited, and I could not find Openoffice in it. While there are links to the larger repositories, for some reason I am unable to search for an application name, and only those apps that are already available in the distro are displayed. Further fiddling is required.