Installing Linux on external USB Drive

[Tekk]

Hello everyone,

long time no see!! Goodness I haven't visited the forums in too long Well its nice to be back.

In any case, I want to bone up on some linux/unix skills but since i'll be traveling alot I had the idea of putting a linux install on a usb drive. My company gave me a laptop and altho I could probably do a dual boot on there (its a 40 gig HDD), since it is my work computer, I dont want anything screwing up and trying to explain to my boss why all my work has suddenly disappeared

Right now I have downloaded Fedora Core 3 but haven't installed it yet. I also have a 20gb HDD sitting around waiting to be used!!! So is it possible to install fedora (or some other linux distro) to a USB drive (stick the internal HDD into an external HDD enclosure with a USB interface) and set my laptop to boot off the usb?

I've also wanted to try installing Solaris on an external USB but apparently thats completely out of the question....well at least according to a post on Sun website's forum.

[rabidaardvark]

I know mandrake does that easily. It's what sold me on it, you can connect to any pc with nearly any hardware configuration and it's like you're back on your own machine. The only thing is the mobo has to support booting from usb. Otherwise you need a bootdisk.

[lynch]

You can install Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux to a usb flash drive.