There are many competing Knoppix derivatives from which you can select, where choices may be determined primarily by the overall size of the destination storage device. USB key-fob flash drives make ideal candidates for such use, as do external USB-based hard drives. Custom-built distributions such as DSL, Feather Linux, and Insert are all excellent small-footprint Knoppix derivatives that may be modified into bootable USB images quickly and easily.

For DSL, your easiest option is to download the embedded zip archive dsl-3.0.1-embedded.zip. For Feather Linux, you'll want to grab feather-0.7.4-usb.zip. These two archives are designed to work directly from USB flash devices. Although CD-ROM images may be modified to work from USB devices as well, these two options require little or no effort to get them running (while that isn't always the case when converting bootable CD-ROM images for USB drives).

Detailed Test Setup

Our own in-house testing proceeded from the two aforementioned distributions. We used a 512 MB Corsair Flash Voyager dressed in its water-resistant rubberized wet suit, though even a modest 64 MB USB key fob offers sufficient storage for these so-called "business-card" CD images (so named because their modest footprints lets them fit onto tiny CDs designed for distribution on plastic business cards).