The Playful Seraph

A couple weeks ago, I went down to Best Buy and bought a $25 1GB USB flash drive. Originally, I had planned to use it to transfer programs from my Windows box (which has an Internet connection) to my Linux box (which is sadly without). When I found that the Linux computer wouldn’t read my flash drive, I turned to making it a bootable Linux distrobution. But that also fell through due to the difficulty in getting one that was easy to install and easy to add programs to.

So, in the end, I decided to use this drive to store everything I needed so that I could use it on the school computers and stay synced with my home computer. I had three goals for this USB drive:

* Encrypted If I lost it, no one should be able to get into any of it, but it should also be easy for me to get into it.

* Enclosed All the programs had to be self-contained so that, no matter what computer I was on, no matter my level of permissions, I could do what I needed to do. And it should also take up as little space as possible, too.
* Effective It had to be more than just a passing interest — I had to make the flash drive usable enough that I would default to it.

Oh, and one more thing: it all had to be free. I’m not expecting it to be all open-source for everything (although that’s a nice bonus), but it needs to cost me a grand total of zero dollars.

During these next few posts, I’ll be detailing how to build up a USB flash drive that accomplishes all my goals while still remaining compact.

Let’s get started.