Buy Debian USB pen drives from Copyleft. These were engineered by Copyleft.

Release notes.
Debian USB Flash Drive by Copyleft

What you need to know NOW

The BIOS on the host machine must be set to boot from the pen-drive. If you are having problems with settings not working, try USB-disk or USB-zip. If all else fails, use the boot CD. The CD will boot most hardware. The host system must be a i686 or better.

The passwords are

user --> passwd
root --> passwd

They must be changed! The command is 'passwd', you need to be in a root terminal to change the root password and in a user terminal to change the user password.

Network. The wired network should work out of the box with DHCP. The wireless network has not been extensively tested as my network is wired. However, people are working on this.

The Copyleft Self-Load DVD. This has instructions on how to load the flash drive. the USB stick must be at least 4GB. Any capacity over 4GB will be lost. The iso image of the boot CD is included. Some experience in this kind of work would be helpful.

Purpose.

To provide pen-drive system which would be the equivalent of a Hard Disk installation.
To be able to be used on a wide range machines with differing hardware.

The Hard Drive equivalent.
The pen-drive was loaded with a standard Debian 5.0 LXDE installation and additional software was installed. Software can be. installed, removed and upgraded and security fixes updated. Apt/aptitude points to http://ftp.nz.debian.org Work can be saved in the normal way onto 1000+MB partition and there is a 200MB fat16 partition to transfer material to and from Windows.

Wide compatibility.
Like any modern distribution, the pen-drive system will reconfigure a machine's hardware whenever it is booted. This includes peripherals like printers. A boot CD is available which will boot the pen-drive on systems without bootable USB ports. The wired network will configure on most if not all systems. The wireless network may need manual configuration on some machines.

Some uses.

1 A pen-drive system bridges a gap for novices between a live CD and a full hard disk installation.
2. Using flash drive will preserve privacy and security on a widely used machine, eg, a family computer.
3. To be able to run GNU/Linux on a Windows household computer.
4. People who need a system with maximum portability.
5. Travellers, particularly international travellers.
6. Playing videos regardless of zones.

Software

Applications include, Gnucash (accounting program), Iceweasel (re-branded Firefox-browser),Icedove (re-branded Thunderbird-mail/news), OpenOffice (office suite), the GIMP (image manipulation), Totem (video and music player). There is over 500MB of space for additional software if required.