Posted on 07/12/2010 5:37:35 AM PDT by ShadowAce
What can you do with a few gigabytes and a USB port? Quite a lot, with the right software. Learn how to encrypt your work, run whole systems, rescue Windows, and customize your thumb drive with these USB-geared tricks.
Photo by Debs (ò‿ó)♪.
Note: Gina previously rounded up 10 thumb drive tricks in April 2007, and we've borrowed a few of those ideas here. But many of the apps have updated, some have been replaced with better offerings, and a few totally new cool things (Chrome OS! XBMC!) have made their way into this mix.
An "oldie" but goodie. If you use multiple USB drives, or just want to make your USB drive more recognizable at a glance, you can give it a custom icon. The root of the trick is keeping a .ico file on the drive—you can create one from any image with any number of tools, including the ConvertIcon webapp. Now when you plug in your USB drive, you'll know which one you're looking at on your desktop and explorer windows.
Google's fast and light netbook operating system, Chrome OS, isn't due out until late fall, but thumb drive owners can jump into an open-source build of the code so far. As explained by Gina, you can run a custom build of Chrome OS from Hexxeh from your thumb drive and try out Chrome as it stands today. Isn't open source development cool? (Original post)
If you're on vacation, or working somewhere else where the security, tracking, and privacy conditions are unknown, you'll be glad you have the DemocraKey bundle. It's a set of Windows-based apps—including a browser, image editor, email client, and encryption suite—that makes browsing and working much more anonymous and secure. (Original post)
XBMC Live, a version of the awesome XBMC media center software built for thumb drives, is great for showing off XBMC to your friends and relatives on their own gear, but also loading onto your netbook or laptop when it primarily pull other duty with a standard operating system. It's also how Adam starts off the process of building a silent, cheap media center, providing a peek at how well things will run when XBMC is going full-force.
If you've chosen to put an Ubuntu system on your thumb drive, you've already got everything you need to fix a Windows system that just isn't working. From an Ubuntu thumb drive, you can scan and fix viruses, recover files, analyze and clean up disk space, fix partitions, and recover lost Windows passwords. All that is covered in our complete guide to saving your Windows system with a thumb drive.
USB drives are small, light, and look like any other peripheral—so, yeah, a good share get lost and left behind. If you're trading your drive between Windows systems, Flash Drive Reminder can pop up a window when you're starting to log off or shut down, reminding you that you've got a drive plugged in and, hey, won't you yank it out while you're thinking of it? (Original post)
If you're short on space for Windows, or you just like to keep certain apps with you or contained on a separate disk, your USB drive can function as a full-fledged launcher. PortableApps offers no-install-needed versions of Firefox, Chrome, Pidgin, GIMP, Notepad++, and many other favorite bits of open source software. There are other suites out there—some accused of playing fast and loose with licenses and software property—but PortableApps remains the most consistent and up-to-date collection of free, go-anywhere Windows software. (Original post)
Not physically self-destruct, as cool as that would be. But with USB Safeguard, you can make it so that either your entire drive requires an encryption drive, or just select files do. In more unique fashion, USB Safeguard can be set to wipe your files entirely if someone tries to access them without your password too many times. Losing a cheap thumb drive is much better than losing the keys to your checking account. (Original post)
Rather than manually copy the files you need back and forth between USB and hard drive, why not automatically sync what you need? It's the least you can do to help your thumb drive keep up with Dropbox. Tools like SyncBack Freeware or Microsoft's own SyncToy give you the option to automatically copy, or delete, the files that stick out on either side.
Linux systems have long been handy on a USB drive—they're fast, free, and very customizable. We rounded up the major thumb drive systems, and found that Puppy Linux and the various Ubuntu flavors (including the lightweight Xubuntu) found the most favor among readers (and editors, too, for that matter). As for making the drives, we recommend the uSbuntu or Unetbootin tools on Windows for making read-only systems, and Universal USB Installer for making a persistent system of any Linux OS on any drive. (Original posts: Universal USB, Unetbootin, uSbuntu)
bump for later.
bttt
Will have to try it sometime.
By the way I didn’t mean to sidetrack your thread, sorry. Thanks, the information is pretty cool and I am going to make two bootable USB devices.
Haven’t decided which route I am going to take other than an NTFS DOS version to carry a lot of specialized low level software (wiping / repairing harddrives, resetting passwords, partitioning, old school stuff, etc...) and a virus scanner (maybe specific virus recovery programs).
The other will have a GUI, haven’t decided what Linux flavor yet (freeware web development, video processing, mp3 player, word processing, and graphics software).
bump
PFL
Sooner or later you’re going to lose your ass there. Reliability is better than it used to be, but if you can’t afford to lose it, don’t trust it to a $20 card.
(As I’ve said on here before...redundancy is your friend!)
Any suggestions?
ML/NJ
That should allow you to edit any file. Your prompt will now be a # instead of a $.
When finished, type in "exit".
ML/NJ
later !
IE had the same trouble until I did "compatability view" but I haven't been able to get Chrome to show drop downs. It's like white text on a white background but you can't mouse over to see anything.
Still struggling here.
I’ve got the sudo thing. I’ve been able to edit the hosts file. Or I think I have. After using gedit (started from terminal) to edit the file, I issue =cat hosts= and the file types out just the way I expect it to. But whenever I restart the system, which I’ve unfortunately had to do many times, the hosts file reverts to the original. (I’ve done nothing but restart and open a terminal and go =cat hosts= and my changes are always gone.) I also once put a copy of the edited file on my desktop, and it was gone after a restart. Something always seems to go wrong after I change the hosts file so I cannot even get to try to download my utilities. Usually windows start greying and then things start disappearing. It appears that something is trying to recreate the disappeared stuff, but whenever it does things are missing (like my internet connection). I thought this was going to be easy!
ML/NJ
The alternative I can think of is don't restart your system right after editing the hosts file.
Instead, restart the network service:
/etc/init.d/network restart
should do the trick in terms of getting your hosts file to behave properly. I've not heard of the file reverting upon a reboot, unless the system is re-writing it upon startup.
Oh--wait a second.
You're running Ubuntu off of your USB stick, right? The /etc directory exists solely in RAM--not on your stick. What you are editing is a temporary copy of the hosts file--not the one installed by the rescue stick.
So--I'm not an expert here, though I've done this once or twice. Look for a directory called something like "/mnt/sysimage/etc" or similar. The file you want to edit will be in there.
Type in the following:
find / -iname /etc/hosts
and see if that returns anything other than /etc/hosts.
Your comment on /etc existing solely in ram is interesting. For one I wonder how I would know that. But even if that is the case, it doesn't explain why the copy of the hosts file I put on the desktop disappeared.
I find it hard to believe that just anyone could just follow the article instructions. I actually used UNIX a bit, back in the pre WWW days; and I have quite a bit of PC and embedded experience. (In fact, I was quite familiar with all the chips IBM decided to use in the original PC.)
My intent is to start over downloading a new clean system, knowing what I have learned and see whether anything improves.
ML/NJ
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