Is there an easy to run (as for hardware) OS that can run off of a usb drive?

[Lennart van de Merwe]

Is there an easy to run (as for hardware) operating system that can run off of a usb drive?

If I were to guess it would be some form of Linux, though I do not know much about Linux so please tell me which one. The only thing the OS has to do is deal with the amazing power of an ancient AMD chip (dunno which one) and run an HTML file stored on the same usb drive (and if possible VLC media player or something similar, but that isn't the most important thing).

 

Please tell me if this isn't possible, because else I'll be wasting lots of time.

 

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, Lennart van de Merwe said:

 

Linux Mint or Ubuntu are fine and basic for that

 

Otherwise there's some more specific stuff built to do that.

[FloRolf]

I've ran Ubuntu from a USB drive with no problem. I even think most OSs can do that, even Windows. 

You could run Linux Mint, as it's even less demanding than Ubuntu iirc

[Master Disaster]

DSL (Damn Small Linux) is about as lightweight as I've ever seen but yeah, basically any distro running XFCE should work.

[Lennart van de Merwe]

3 hours ago, Streetguru said:

Linux Mint or Ubuntu are fine and basic for that

 

Otherwise there's some more specific stuff built to do that.

I've made a bootable usb drive with Ubuntu for the laptop in question, plugged it in and booted into the bios, the problem is: there is no option to boot from a usb. It is an old bios, so do I need to update or whatever?

[jpenguin]

On my old computer, to boot from USB, I have to change a section that lists HDDs to have mu USB on top.  You can also try plop boot manager

 

Ubuntu works as a live distribution, but Knoppix & Puppy are made to be run from USB/CD

[Montgomery C Burns]

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