Fedora 9 Puts Your Desktop on a USB Drive

This past week’s release of the Fedora 9 Linux makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don’t need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up. After the jump, let’s create a fully-functional desktop-to-go using a simple Windows program and a 1GB or larger thumb drive.

Turning a live CD ISO into a bootable USB image has been possible for some time now, but it usually involves some heavy lifting with the command line, and almost always in Linux. Fedora’s liveusb-creator program makes USB imaging dead simple, and the Fedora distribution itself has a lot going for it. The latest “community” version of Red Hat’s Linux package benefits from the same updates to the GNOME desktop that Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron includes, and KDE fans get a pretty full-featured version that runs on the customizable KDE 4. You can see a full list of updates and improvements to Fedora 9 here, but it’s best to check it out for yourself. Here’s how…