Bootable USB stick: the verdict

Another one for the techies! This may fry your brain if you don't grok computers.

In an earlier post, I described that I'd put together a bootable USB stick with a complete operating system on it. I also described how to subvert the block on Flickr by using the Access Flickr Firefox Addon.

I used the stick most of the time in hotels and coffeenets (Internet cafes) and it was a life-saver. Plenty of the machines we used had all kinds of duff software on them and unpatched versions of Windows XP. The USB stick gave us excellent peace of mind. No matter where we were, we effectively had the same computer all the time - and that computer weighs just a few grams and lives in a trouser pocket.

Access Flickr worked a treat every time we tried to use it, so we could upload images to Flickr and blog them from there. We didn't have to worry about our passwords being hijacked by keyloggers.

Ubuntu always found the wired network and connected automatically; in one place I had to choose a wireless connection from a graphical drop-down and once I'd done that, connectivity was established.

I picked up a cheapo Compact Flash card reader, so between that and the bootable USB stick, I could grab files from the big camera, copy them temporarily to a hard disk for sorting, selection, editing and uploading to Flickr. At no stage did I have to care about other stuff that might be installed on existing hard disks, or worry about stuff cached by the browser.

I found that coffeenet proprieters were cool about letting me modify the BIOS on their boxes once they know I was booting Ubuntu; in hotel coffeenets, I'd just get permission from non-technical staff to insert the USB stick and help myself to BIOS config. Only one hotel had computers in which the BIOS was passsword-protected, and all of the machines I used had BIOSes which were recent enough to allow booting from USB devices.

Those were the pros; what about the cons?

The USB stick is supposed to allow changes to be persisted between boots; so for example if I install Access Flickr and say ClamAV, those items ought to be present the next time I booted off the stick. This wasn't the case - I need to understand why. In future I'll build the bootable stick using Ubuntu 8.10's built-in tool.

I found that on machines with 512Mb of RAM, Ubuntu tended to lock up after a short period of time (a few tens of minutes), probably due to hitting some memory limit. The problem didn't happen on machines with more RAM. Perhaps another reason to use Ubuntu's bootable USB creator.

Any time I wanted to use the bootable USB stick I had to go through a bit of a rigmarole:

• Power off the computer
• Insert the stick in a free USB port
• Start the machine and go straight into the BIOS
• If the BIOS was password-protected, get permission to make modifications
  
• Specify the boot order as follows: CD, USB, Internal disk. Sometimes this involved making changes in two places
  
• Save the BIOS changes and reboot again
• Wait for Ubuntu to boot up - this was slow enough on some machines
  

Firefox didn't have a functioning version of Flash installed. At any rate, Flickr's Flash-based picture rotation didn't work and nor did Picnik - though this was probably because of the Internet blocks on Flickr. Neither was Java installed.

All in all, the pros outweighed the cons for me; I'd consider getting a larger capacity USB stick or a laptop drive in a USB enclosure the next time I go on holidays and have to rely on Internet Cafes.

Get around the Internet blocks in Iran

The Iranian state has a tight control on which web sites its citizens may visit. (China and Turkey are two other countries whose governments are fearful of a medium whose content they cannot control.) Among the websites 'filtered' are Blogger and Flickr.

However software systems have the wonderful property that if something is disabled through software, it's possible to get around that in software too. Enter Access Flickr!, a Firefox add-on which, when installed in Firefox on my virus-proof bootable USB stick, will allow me to blog from anywhere where I can find an internet-connected computer - including Iran. Yes, the web truly is subversive.

Iranian Coffeenets: protect yourself from viruses

The following paragraph jumped out at me from the guide book over the weekend as I was blobbed out on the couch doing 'research':

Unfortunately, Iranian coffeenets are badly infected with viruses. During this research trip our USB memory stick picked up more than 50 viruses, worms, Trojan horses, key-loggers and other nasties. So be careful about doing internet banking unless the anti-virus software is up to date, and scan carefully before sticking anything into your your own computer that has been in an Iranian machine. (July 2008 Lonely Planet Iran)

I don't use Windows on any of my computers - I use Linux. Recent advances in Linux mean that it's now possible to have a complete, bootable installation of Linux on a memory stick, with room left over for another partition for your data - photos, text, whatever. It struck me that a very useful option would be to use a bootable USB stick in Iranian coffeenets (Internet cafes) - it'll just depend on how amenable the owners are on letting me reboot their boxes and fiddle with BIOS boot-order settings. Assuming that some at least will be cool about it, I've made myself a bootable, writable Linux distro on a stick by following these short, simple and clear instructions.

The newest Ubuntu distribution, 8.10, includes a utility for making a bootable USB stick too, though I haven't tried this yet.