My dad just bought an extremely small laptop to take with him when he rides his motorcycle. It runs on xandros. Because it is so small it only has a 2 gb hd. He wants to know if it's possible to run software from a flash drive. I've never used a flash drive so I have no idea.

Anyone?

Shouldn't be a problem running a program from it no. Although I certainly wouldn't recommend running from a USB stick - since it'll wear it out quicker if there's a lot of IO activity.

Flash cards are normally used in network devices with operating systems installed on them - so compact flash or similar will be fine to run stuff from.

Thanks for the fast reply ian.

No probs

I don't have this problem, but just out of curiosity: how do you set the drive in which the program is installed? I mean, it's not like in windows where you can decide before the installation where to install it. How do you change the destination folder, or drive?

Statically built binaries will run from anywhere.
On dynamically built binaries, you simply set the destination directory at compile time:
./configure --prefix=/{put-your-preferred-destination-here}

A very small laptop runnig Xandros? Umm it sounds like an eee to me, see my posts oh how to install mandriva on it or on usb key (mcnl live toronto) or Breeezy (puppy linux) or Eeedora (based on FC 8)

see :

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/

stef

Indeed, it ought to be an eee.
I really want one, but I'lll wait for the ten-inch screen model, and then dump Xandros and put in it Archlinux (some guys at Archlinux AUR have already packed customized kernels for eee).
Other than that, I could probably try Puppy on it, but no other distro.