Jul 23
adminLinux Flash Drive, News Encrypted Flash Drive, linux flash drive, USB boot drive, usb flash drive
Nothing can beat having a great Linux distro installed on a super-fast hard drive, with all your favourite apps configured just how you like them and all your files at your fingertips. But this has one major drawback: perfect as your setup is, it’s also just one machine, and sooner or later you’ll be forced to leave that computer behind and use something else. Something that might run Windows. Something that might not even have Firefox.
Because no one likes being parted from their data for too long, we present a smarter option: store it all on a USB flash drive…
In older days, you were able to store Linux on a CD and use a flash drive just to save changes. After some advancements, you were able to run Linux straight from the flash drive, but it didn’t store any changes you made. But the latest generation of Linux distros – namely Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 9 – have a memory overlay system that allows you to store your Linux distro and any changes you make to it on a single flash drive. Sure, you’ll need at least 1GB to be able to fit the entire distro on there, but it does mean everything you need is all on the one device.
Once you switch your install to a flash drive, it means you can take it pretty much anywhere and get back to work immediately. Whether you’re using a server, a desktop or even a tiny little Aspire One or Eee PC, the vast majority of modern computers support booting straight from USB, so you can just plug in your drive and go.
You’ll need a flash drive with at least 1GB of free space, and ISO images of either Ubuntu 8.10 or Fedora 9. It’s likely there are other distros out there that work with similar or perhaps even identical instructions, but Ubuntu and Fedora are the big two so we stuck with them.
One of the first thing you encounter when switching to free software are people who want to let you know all a bout the difference between free beer and free speech, and that’s all very nice. But for most us, nearly all our software is free of cost and free to modify, so in our minds we balk at the idea of paying for functionality. However, if you want to put Linux on a flash drive you really do have to fork out and buy some hardware, so if you don’t already have a good flash drive you need to read this first.
There are five things you’ll want to consider when buying the perfect flash drive for Linux. If we order them with the most important first, it looks like this:
- Reliability. This is easily the most important thing to care about, because it doesn’t matter how cheap, fast and spacious a flash drive is when it dies after 20 minutes. If losing your data is simply not an option (and, let’s face it, that’s almost certainly the case), go for a brand name you trust – we chose Corsair, because it’s a company with a huge amount of experience making quality flash drives, and its Flash Voyager range is designed to be water- and shock-proof.
- Cost. This is always going to be a consideration, but fortunately flash prices have dropped dramatically in recent years – whereas 256MB drives used to be £60 or £70, you can now get 32GB drives for the same price. That’s over 100 times the capacity for the same price!
- Capacity. 1GB is the absolute minimum needed to get started, but it really depends on how much data you want to store – and also how much extra software you want to install. If cost is an issue, the best value drive sizes right now are 4GB or 8GB.
- Speed. The simple rule here is “pay more, get more”. Companies such as OCZ and Corsair specialise in high-performance devices – Corsair even makes a special range of flash drives (known as ‘GT’) that are made from extra-fast components. Remember, your entire computer will be running from this tiny device, so only go for a slow drive if you’re a very, very patient person.
- Size. Arguably the least important consideration is the actual physical size of the flash drive. This isn’t usually a problem because all flash drives are necessarily small, and it’s only if you’re after a particularly tiny one that you even need to consider this. SanDisk’s Cruzer Micro and Corsair’s Flash Voyager Mini both come in 4GB and 8GB capacities, despite being less than half the size of conventional drives.
Make your choice
There are two distinct ways of running Linux from a flash drive, but we’ll only be covering one of them here – and for good reason, as you’ll see.
The two ways are: using your flash drive as a Live CD, and using the drive as a full Linux install. Perhaps surprisingly, the first option is the better one for several reasons:
- Live CDs scan the hardware at boot time, and so are likely to be compatible with the most machines.
- Live CDs must by necessity have a small footprint, which means there’s more space for your files – or you can just buy a smaller, cheaper drive.
- Live CDs run as much as they can in RAM, which makes for better performance.
- Live CDs don’t use swap.
That last point is actually the most important one of all: Linux makes extensive use of hard drives to save temporary data, and if you treat your flash drive as a real hard drive then Linux will use it for swap, too.
The problem is that flash drives, like all flash memory devices, have a limited number of times they can be written to before they fail. Most drives are able to withstand 100,000 writes to every memory sector, but the best can handle up to 1,000,000 and often automatically balance writes to ensure that no one sector gets excessively worn out while others are sitting untouched. Again, this is a reliability factor, so if you care for keeping your data intact for a long time it’s worth you buying a trusted brand.
Just how fast is it?
As fast as flash memory is compared with mechanical hard disks, it’s still limited by the throughput of USB. But on the upside, the lack of swap availability means that Linux will take advantage of your RAM much more, which means the most commonly accessed data will be just as fast if not faster when using USB drives.
If you’re used to using a Live CD, you’ll also be pleased to know there’s much less noise (the triple-digit decibel whir of a busy DVD drive is, of course, absent with flash drives), and there’s also none of the latency that usually happens when the OS lets the DVD drive go idle.
On the flip side, the nature of Live distros means they must detect their environment during boot up, so expect boot times to be a bit longer.
Do it with Ubuntu
Ubuntu 8.10 doesn’t contain much in the ‘wow’ department, but it does come with a USB installation wizard as standard. This works by mimicking the Casper system of running a live operating system from read-only media – with the exception that flash drives aren’t read-only, so you can actually make changes to the OS.
Even after Ubuntu is installed to your drive, it still looks and feels as if it works in Live mode, so you’ll be prompted to choose a language when it boots up. This might seem like an annoyance, but it does come with the added bonus that the Ubuntu hard disk installer is always within reach – you can use your flash drive as an Ubuntu installer on as many PCs as you want.
Get Ubuntu on your flash drive
Start the app
Plug in the drive – Once the app is running, go ahead and plug in your flash drive. Ubuntu will automatically mount the drive, and it will appear in the USB startup disk window.
Download Ubuntu – Now download the version of Ubuntu you want to use. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 32-bit or 64-bit, or whether it’s 8.04 LTS or 8.10. If you have an Ubuntu CD handy, you can use that.
Select your ISO – Click on the Other button to choose the ISO you just downloaded. If you have a real CD, it should be auto-detected.
Choose free space – Make sure you specify that documents and settings be stored in reserved extra space, then drag the slider up as far as you want it. Don’t worry – the space for the Live CD image is automatically deducted.
Sit back and wait – When you’re ready, click Make Startup Disk, then sit back and wait – it will take a few minutes to copy the image, and if you have a large flash drive you can expect it to take up to 10 minutes in total.
reboot pc
Reboot your PC – When the installer finishes, click Quit then reboot your computer. This is the tricky part: you need to press a key to get to your BIOS boot screen then choose the right device.
Booting from your flash drive
The more advanced your motherboard, the more options you will have to boot from. But sometimes even the best motherboards don’t have a USB booting option – even though they support it. To get started, read the BIOS output when your computer boots up and note down which key you have to press to select your boot device. Some BIOSes don’t have such a screen, so you may need to go into the setup system to manually reorder your boot devices. Once that’s done, the next problem is to figure out just which device represents your flash drive.
In our tests, most motherboards that don’t have a single “USB” option instead have things like “USB-FDD”, “USB-CDROM” and even “USB-ZIP”, and one of these was the correct option on all the machines. Of course, your own machine will almost certainly be different, so you’ll probably need to work your way through the most popular options to see what works.
Choose your language – When your USB Linux boots, you’ll see the usual ‘Choose your language’ screen, and it will log in as the Live session user.
customise
Customise! – Your flash drive is finished: now you can make all the customizations you want, because it all gets saved. Add users, add packages, and make it your own!
Make these changes
Once you have your Linux installation, you can do with it as you please. But we’d recommend you make some or all of these simple changes to make it truly feel like home:
- Add your own user. Running under the Live session user will get old sooner or later, so create your own user and home directory, and make sure you give it the “administer the system” privilege.
- Set a strong password for yourself, and/or the root user. Lots of people hate the way Ubuntu insists on using sudo – if you’re one of them, run sudo bash, enter your password, then type passwd to set the root password yourself. After that, su works fine.
- Delete the ‘Install’ item from the desktop. If you want to use your stick to install custom Ubuntus around the office, you’ll want to keep this; otherwise, bin it and don’t look back.
- Customise the software. Replace OpenOffice.org with AbiWord if you want to, or get your favourite coding tools in place.
- Update, update, update: you have a real Linux system now, which means staying up to date with patches and other updates.
It’s important to remember that as you make changes from the default installation, you are possibly straying away from what makes the Live CD so darn useful in the fi rst place. For example, if you configure it to automatically use a specific X.org configuration your graphical display (perhaps to enable 3D hardware acceleration on Nvidia cards using a proprietary driver), it may mean that your flash drive Ubuntu won’t work so well on other machines.
Yes, Ubuntu is supposed to have a failsafe X.org mode that switches to a standard VESA-compatible resolution when it encounters problems, but we find that rarely works when we need it!
Installing to USB
Although the Live USB method of installing Ubuntu is the easiest and safest, there is one good alternative: when you’re installing Ubuntu from a CD-ROM, slot in your flash drive and choose that as the installation target. The problem, as mentioned earlier, is that it will wear down your flash drive with unnecessary writes, and the solution here is to edit your /etc/fstab file so that it uses tmpfs (otherwise known as a RAM disk) for the /tmp directory. For example:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
If you have enough RAM you should be able to do without swap entirely, which neatly sidesteps this problem.
source: tuxdar.com
Jun 24
adminLinux Flash Drive Encrypted Flash Drive, linux flash drive, USB boot drive, USB encryption, usb protection
Encrypted USB Drive is cost effective method of securing confidential data. Encrypted USB provides best security for storing and transmitting confidential data.
Insecure USBs can cost company’s millions in damage control, but some company’s continue to use them. The only solution to this is to secure confidential data with a secure USB drive. By doing this company’s can avoid these unnecessary expenditures.
There are plenty of protected USB drives in the market but all protected USB drives are not reliable, some of them use outdated encryption algorithms where USB security comes in danger zone. One must follow some guidelines while buying an encrypted USB such as:
- Drive and encryption works across multiple Operating Systems
- Ability to encrypt files on USB and computer also
- Should provide password management facilities
- An accurate and efficient mechanism for deleting files from the drive
- Should provide you at least AES 256-bit Encryption
AES 256-bit Encryption allows you to get the highest level USB protection available for your files. We can also divide USB devices into secure area and public area after encryption. Encrypted Linux Flash Drives has higher level of security. Data on secure area will be accessible only through password but on public area it will be accessible to anyone. One can also hide data for better security on USB by deleting the files and recovering back when needed.
Theft of valuable data is rising day by day with inferior USB drives.If a company is not using USB encryption it is not taking essential steps to protect their data.Using encrypted flash drives are best option to ensure that you are not next victim to data theft. So encrypted USB drive is an effective tool for protection of your data from inside and outside threats.
Jun 18
adminLinux Flash Drive Encrypted Flash Drive, linux flash drive, USB boot drive, USB encryption, usb protection
USB security must be a no-brainer because we all need to protect our vital information and personal data on USB flash drives. This is particularly important as the usage of these small-sized flash drives is getting increased day by day along with the incidences of lost and stolen USB drives that ultimately leads to data loss and privacy breach.
Surely, we all might not carry private and confidential stuff on these portable drives all the time, so we would not have to be anxious about privacy breach and identity theft every time we use them, but there are some confidential data that we would certainly not want to slip into the wrong hands, and for that we simply password protect our USB drives or try the most complicated encryption option. Since the encryption method is very complicated, many users prefer password protecting their USB flash drive.
You must have heard that USB drives have been accused for privacy breach and identity theft just because they are small enough to get stolen and misplaced. Even though, many people are using them to take their data from one PC to another. This has been a positive approach towards USB and other storage devices.
To attain complete USB security in USB drive, you must have a strong password locking protection that is easy to use but impossible to break like that of USB Secure which is very easy to use when it comes to protect your flash drive but its protection is so hard that it cannot be broken.
You can find numbers of USB Security software but the point is that you have to select the BEST among them, and how do you decide which software is the Best? I always recommend not to use any freeware security application as they pose great risk of data loss. This does not mean that you should have to buy a very expensive security software. You should always keep few things in mind when you want to buy any USB security software; e.g. what kind of security you want for your USB drive and how many portable devices you want to protect with it as many of us carry more than one portable devices like flash drive, memory cards and external drive, so it is important to have a security software that supports all type of storage devices.
Source:Ezinearticles.com
Jun 17
adminLinux Flash Drive Encrypted Flash Drive, linux flash drive, USB boot drive, USB encryption, usb protection
It would not be wrong to say that a large number of people are carrying their life on USB encrypted flash drives. Whether, it is their email, contacts, current/ongoing work, passwords, useful utilities or anything else that they need, people like to carry it on their flash drives. The small size, capacity to store large amount of data, simple operating system, USB encryption etc are some of the qualities that makes it the most popular and useful tool in the computer technology.
Some of the other advantages of USB flash drive are that it can easily be inserted into the USB port of the computer and the data can be easily and safely transferred in to the computer. It is a useful and reliable source as compared floppy disks as they are small, don’t gather much space and are not delicate as floppies and disks. USB encrypted flash drives provide more benefits to its users than storing information. Flash drives these days can also be used for getting an entire operating system on them. It can be done with the help of firmware available for the PCs. Linux flash drive is one of the most common operating system used these days and is beneficial if you are looking forward to indulge in multitasking like installing operating systems across a network or for loading minimal kernel for embedded operations or maintenance tasks.
Even though it has been called the most useful tool in the computer technology concern has always been raised about safety and security of the USB encrypted flash drive. Being of the small size that it is, none of us can renounce the fact that it is quite easy to lose a flash drive or forget it somewhere or what if someone tries to steal it knowing that you keep all your essential data and information in it. To overcome this situation and to keep all your information and data secured, all you need is USB protection. You can now easily protect all your data and private information by encrypting your data and controlling access to it with a password.
With USB protection now available it is no possible to all your data without any fear of it being misused. In the end, all we can say is that USB flash drives have improved as per the requirement of the users and will keep changing to match the changing needs of the users.
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Encrypted flash drive is one of the most cost effective method of data protection. It makes company’s data safe and protective but not expensive.Encrypted flash drive is best security measure available for storing and transmitting confidential data.Sometime non secure USB drives can cost in millions to companies in damage control.These unnecessary expenditures can be avoided by using secure USB drives.
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