Xy on a flash drive

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Rene,

Do you also write the stuff you save onto that flash drive ? If not,
what setup adjustments do you make to write your files elsewhere ?

One of my longer range projects is to create a fairly close replica of
my own, customized OS/2 + key app.s environment on a bootable CD that
could be carried around to most any guest machine I might find myself
at. This is supposed to be possible, though fairly complicated to
achieve because of the divergent hardware involved and other reasons.
I don't think it is possible for Win, don't know about Linux. (I am
NOT referring to a boot/install CD, or some emergency access type of
thing, but rather about being able to take most of one's existing home
computing environment around on just a cd.) To this end, I have
accumulated three separate and detailed "How To" articles, and a few
standalone utilities devoted to the task.

Assuming the guest hardware issues can be finessed, a key problem
crops up in regard to any file that has to be written / saved /
updated from the time one boots such a cd. There are key things that
just won't work unless files can be written or updated, probably
including your browser. Not to mention the swapfile. And, of course,
all the files stored on a cd exist in Read Only format. All of these
schemes on the OS/2 side make substantial use of a Ramdisk. (Ramdisks
are not permitted in Win-32, from NT-4 on -- or so I've been told.)
So, I guess any file that needs to be written somewhere has to have
its output redirected to the Ramdisk. That would seem to indicate a
certain minimum amount of Ram, too.

I'm not sure what relevance this may have, if any, to these new
USB-based flash drives, but I think they may come in sizes up to 1G,
and some you might be able to boot an OS off of. I'm glad you can at
least run Xy off it, and that does sound like it could be very useful.



Jordan