Ubuntu 9.10 on a USB Stick

Since Ubuntu 9.10 came out I have been playing with the Desktop and Server releases quite a bit. In the Server instance they now include Ubuntu’s Enterprise Cloud, which is really a fantastic piece of kit. More information can be found here. The part I like the most is being able to move your machines between a public environment (EC2) to a private one (your Enterprise Cloud). That’s all contained in the Server release and I’ll have a post on that later.

But what I want to inform you all of today is that with the live version of Ubuntu Desktop you can install it on a USB stick and boot from it. Whats different in this release compared to others is that there is a GUI tool for you to do it. None of this messing about with text files trying to get a bootloader and bios to work together.

1. You just load up the live disk.
2. Connect your USB stick (preferably unformated).
3. Go to the GUI tool called ” USB Startup Disk Creater” located in System->Administration->USB Startup Disk Creater.
4. This will format the USB stick for you and you and then specify how much space you want to save data to on the partitions.
5. Then you write the changes to the USB stick.

Job done.

A more in-depth step-by-step set of instructions can be found here