A bootable 4 GB Flash Drive containing a portable version of Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available from Mandriva for 79 EUR ($89) and from Amazon for $94. The general idea is that you can take this little memory stick with you and be able to run Linux from it, do Internet and Office tasks with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and save your files to the free space on the drive. The Mandriva system can access I tried this device out on the two computers I have at home, a fairly new Compaq Presario V6000 laptop, and a 5-year-old Compaq Evo desktop. After some configuration issues, it worked fairly well on the new laptop. It was unusable on the old desktop, which barely met the minimum hardware requirements, although it’s possible that with some tweaking it might be made to work better.The first hurdle to using Mandriva Flash on any machine is getting the computer to boot from the flash drive. On my laptop, pressing Esc at boot time let me change the boot order for the current boot process. On the Evo desktop, changing the boot order didn’t work, but the Mandriva Flash software was able to write a boot menu onto the hard drive.The next hurdle on the laptop was getting the Broadcom wireless network adapter turned on. It took quite a bit of digging, but I eventually found the magic formula on the Mandriva Wiki: I had to download a small firmware file to the flash drive from Windows, reboot, and then reconfigure the network driver in Linux. Both the Metisse and Compiz Fusion 3D desktops worked well on the laptop, but were disabled on the old desktop. I’m not sure why people really want 3D desktops, however: it’s just eye-candy.I found Perl, Ruby, Python and Java on the drive, along with Vi, but no gcc, gdb, or emacs. It currently has no way to run Windows software. As configured, it’s a reasonable portable desktop system for casual Linux users, which might be more convenient than carrying around a Linux Live CD and a separate flash drive. Software Development