Fedora 9 now lets you create a bootable Linux distribution on a flash drive with persistence. In other words, you can not only boot any PC that will accept USB drive booting into Linux, you can even boot into your own personal desktop. Now, that can be useful.

Perhaps the easiest way to set up your own Fedora desktop on a stick is to use, believe it or not, liveusb-creator on Windows. This program gives you a straightforward GUI for creating Fedora desktop sticks. There is also a version of the program for Linux, but it’s still in beta.

Of course, you can also install the Fedora stick desktop with command-line instructions. I tried both ways, and while the Windows application is mindlessly simple, using the manual way on Linux isn’t going to task anyone with any Linux experience.

Either way you do it, you have the option of installing Fedora as a non-destructive upgrade, so if you already have files on a USB drive you can keep them while still turning the stick into a bootable drive. In practice, however, I found that I got better results by zapping the stick’s files and reformatting it. After all, it is just a USB drive. As far as I’m concerned, they’re meant for temporary storage.

I also found, although Red Hat staffers told me that you can deploy Fedora on USB sticks with as little as 64MB of storage, you really don’t want to do it with drives that hold less than 512MB. Officially, Fedora recommends that you use 1GB or larger USB drives.

The USB stick needs to be formatted in FAT-16 or -32 or the ext2 or ext3 filesystems. Most drives arrive preformatted in Windows’ FAT-32.

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