you can run it [ubuntu] from a USB flash drive. Here are the Instructions on the Ubuntu site
So can I use the live boot USB drive with a small file system ALSO on the USB drive? (saved config, user file, user documents, etc, all in real files on the flash drive.) I'd gladly sacrifice boot time and ram for the "live" image to have a USB stick I could insert "anywhere" and run MY unix environment... (normally, the "try it out" option just decompresses a virgin filesystem to ramdisk, right? I want it to decompress almost everything to ramdisk, and look to the USB drive for everything else...)