So I have a 4gb USB jump drive, and I wanna get a good portible OS.
OS's I've tried on it:
Ubuntu
DSL
Feather
Haiku
Red Hat
Chrome
Arch

None of them did it for me. So, can you recommend me a good one?
It needs to have wifi support, be small enough to fit on the jump drive,
be bootable from the jump drive, and resonably fast. What are your recommendations?

My favorite for super-portable was a Small Linux, back in the day when all that I had to work with was a 64MB (megabyte!) flash drive. I get the impression that it might no longer be as well-maintained as it once was, but it's probably still worth an hour to give it a try. I've also been led to believe that Puppy Linux is fairly reputable.

I've heard some good things about Puppy Linux, I might give it a try. Thanks.

Sure! I hope that whether or not people give you some other recommendations in the meantime, that you will post your impressions of the OSes that you try.

Of course! I'm halfway done downloading the Puppy Linux .iso now, which I will have to burn to a disk, boot from, and then use an option to copy onto a external drive.

Status on Puppy Linux: Booted fine from disk, and VERY fast from what I see. The only problem is it doesn't work with my type of wifi, thus making it not an option. (For future reference, WEP2, I think.)

So I herd wep/2 was not very secure. But it is easier to connect to, and more computers use it.

That aside, Puppy Linux has to be my favorite small OS. I've tried DSL (D*mn small linux) but never really liked the interface. Never heard of the Chrome OS, so I'll have to try that soon. Gluck with finding it, I'll probably need a nice one, too eventually

Hmm, tell the truth, I would use Virtual Box to load any of those

More specifically, it didn't work with your wireless card? Or it didn't understand the encryption your network uses? (The usual types, in order of security from least to greatest, are WEP, WPA, and WPA2).

What was wrong with the distros you tried to put on your flash drive?

None of them "did it for him." I'm sorta wondering that myself, now that you bring it up.

Maybe puppy linux will learn all the tricks? </pun>

Fail pun make me sad. Nevertheless, all those OSes that he listed as not working out are fairly honed and polished, and flexible to new interfaces and customization, so I share Kllrnohj's curiosity about why he didn't like them.

I do find Knoppix to be a very strong for system rescue operations. I also wonder why none of those worked for him as well.

For a while my school's computer center was solely promoting Knoppix LiveCDs for testing out Linux, coding C in a *nix environment on otherwise Windows computers, and doing system rescue operations, but I think they've entirely switched to Ubuntu at this point.

SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX SLAX !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



...win....

Other than spamming the name of a distro, can you back up your claim with some solid reasons why you like Slax?

(geez, I'm channeling Kllrnohj today)

Slax: it's quick, effective, and extremely custimizalbe. I appologize for the spamming. hahah. Some AP Computer Science kids just called me a troll. 0x5!

*Customizable *apologize. Why would you say it's better than other distros, though? What does it offer or do that others do not?

The "Quirky" derivative of Puppy Linux is pretty solid. The installation is fairly easy, and the instructions are very straightforward.

A couple of other mentions are SliTaZ and Tiny Core. SliTaZ is about 25 MB, and has a full desktop. There aren't very many applications bundled with it, of course. Tiny Core is about 10 MB, and pretty much lacks any bundled applications. The idea is that the user should connect to its package database upon loading the system and just grab the applications they actually plan to use. That's pretty straightforward, and doesn't pose any inconvenience if you have a fast connection.

MenuetOS it's small ( you can boot it's smallest variant off of a floppy disc ) it's fast ( not a Unix shell ) and it's written mostly in pure X86 ASM from what I understand ( and has a large variety of applications for it )