>>> However, the idea of being able to just plug in a USB stick and click 
>>> an icon and instantly have a complete Linux environment set up 
>>> exactly the way I want it is... pretty neat, actually.
>>
>> You might have problems with IO speed if you do that. USB is a lot 
>> slower than SATA.
> 
> Depends what you want to do. Running Damn Small Linux from a USB drive 
> is probably *faster* than running it from a CD-ROM due to the vastly 
> superior seek time. (CD-ROM drives typically have a horrible seek time!) 
> Also, DSL is based on KNOPPIX and uses a cloop compressed filesystem 
> image, so there's less data to shift (but more CPU load).
> 
> If I get bored enough maybe I'll benchmark it. But either way, it's a 
> trivial matter to copy a folder off the USB drive and onto a spare 
> folder on the local HD, run it for a while, and then just delete it when 
> you're done. That's about the easiest install/uninstall procedure 
> imaginable! ;-)

I was wrong.

DSL copies *the entire CD image* into RAM when it boots. So the medium 
it's running from affects only the time taken to load the whole image 
into RAM; after that, it makes no difference at all.

(In fact, if you copy the CD ISO-image onto your HD and run QEMU, DSL 
boots *faster* than if you really boot from CD.)

In terms of running speed however... Well it turns out that with a few 
mouse clicks you can install Doom under DSL. (The speed with which it 
downloaded and installed shocked me for a moment - until I remembered 
that back when Doom came out, all games came on 1.44 MB floppies, not 
dual-layer BluRay disks like they do today.) Doom runs pretty fast when 
booting DSL natively, and slightly slower under QEMU. (The speed 
difference is small enough that I'm not sure if I imagined it.)

That's a pretty impressove vote for QEMU!

OTOH, my system here at work has very little RAM and a slow CPU, so 
running QEMU basically disables the whole of the rest of the machine. 
You can run QEMU *or* do something else, but not both. (My monster 
machine at home has no such difficulty.)

PS. Yes, I'm playing Doom at work. And? ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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