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Now you can carry Linux on your USB drive and boot it anywhere. May be you are thinking that it will consume GBs of space on your USB drive, but don’t worry it will take just around 50 MB space. Also you can boot it within Windows. This special tiny version of Linux is known as Damn Small Linux or DSL.

Features of DSL at a glance

• Damn Small Linux can boot from business card CD as Live Linux.
• You can boot DSL directly from USB pen drive.
• The great feature of DSL is that you can run it within the host operating system like Windows.
• DSL requires very little system resources to run; only 128 MB of RAM and can run with only 468 Mhz processor.
• If you install DSL on normal hard disk then it will automatically transform into Debian OS.
• It’s fully customizable.

Installing DSL on a USB Pen drive is very easy and it is recommended to install it on a minimum 512 MB drive but it can run on 128 MB pen drive as well. You can install DLS within Windows just with simple steps below.

[1] Download DSL here and SysLinux here. SysLinux will act as a boot loader for FAT file system.

[2] Now just format your USB drive in FAT.

[3] Unzip the DLS on your USB drive.

[4] Finally install SysLinux.

You can find a complete installation guide here. Damn Small Linux is really very useful specially when you are traveling and using public computers. You can also purchase pre-installed pendrive from DSL website.