Most Linux users are familar with Damn Small Linux. Their goal is to provide thin, yet full featured Linux Live Business Card CD. It offers a full suite of applications, sound and networking support and even extending it with add-ons without re-mastering the LiveCD. In fact, yesterday they released ver 2.1.
For a while now, they've offered an "embedded" version aimed at x86 machines and utilizes QEMU as its x86 virtual machine. It's different only in that you can launch it from a Windows Batch script or Linux x86 shell script.
The embedded version also has a 60 meg virtual harddrive to save your changes.
One of the cool things is you can suspend your current session and restore it elsewhere using QEMU console commands (so much for IBM's SoulDrive - I used to do this on an old Mac using SoftPC)
Ctrl+Alt+2
savevm FileLocation
OR
qemu -savevm FileLocation
qemu -loadvm FileLocation (remaining switches)
Here's the URIs:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/dsl-...
There are some caveats, such as the recent release is still using some older software, like Firefox 1.06 and QEMU 0.7.0 (it's at 0.8.0 now with improved VLAN networking and different switches) -- so you may need to make your add-on for the new Firefox and update your QEMU executables and start scripts like I did. But, it does work properly out-of-the-box - just unzip and start the script.
It fits perfectly on to a 128 meg stick. You might be able to tweak it and resize the virtual drive from 60meg down to 10meg to fit it on a 64meg stick.
Have fun. Later, Markus.
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