Recently in Google OS Category

I've been meaning to do this for ages, and I finally installed Puppy Linux on a bootable USB drive.

I went whole hog and used a 128 MB stick. Yep, that's it. I have a huge 20 MB left for storage. Now that I know this works (at least on my Dell, the only box to which I have access that also allows booting via USB) I'll get a bigger stick and actually have some room to, as they say, maneuver.

Doing the install was easy. I booted Puppy 4.1.2 from a CD I had previously burned (I know Puppy is up to 4.2 ... I'll have to try it). Then I used the menu to install to USB. The only thing I did that wasn't a default was selecting mbr.bin as the boot method. It works.

Things I was pleased about in Puppy 4.1.2, which blazes on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM, include Abiword with working spell-check (never did get that together in OpenBSD; they should package it to work right ... but I digress), and the inclusion of apps that make this a great working environment.

I already loaded a couple of IMAP accounts into Seamonkey's mail client, and if I did have the disk space, I could use gFTP to load all my stuff onto the USB stick.

Considering that these sticks are pretty much laying around and can be had for free, this is a great way to put together a cloud-computing environment if you have all of your mail and files in something like Google Docs and Gmail. Who needs to wait for Chrome OS?

Leave it to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols to provide more detail on Google's just-announced Chrome OS and why it looks like more of a contender than most are thinking/saying.

Cnet's Microsoft reporter, Ina Fried (disclaimer: we worked together back in the stone age) has some interesting things to say about how Microsoft should respond to the Google OS threat — by acting more like Apple.