Recommend me a USB stick bootable Linux distro please.

Hi there

I want to install an OS on my USB stick so I can run it anywhere I plug it in. I am considering one of the many Linux versions in the world, but I don't know which one to pick, because I'm new to Linux. I've tried a couple Linux distro's a couple years back on an old PC so I'm not a total noob, but still, I' don't know what I'm doing in the Linux world. I left Linux when I got my new laptop and vista with it. Now I am considering it again because there are no tools to run Vista from a USB stick and Linux should give me at least equal performance. I'm not looking for an emergency booting disk, I want a real, complete OS which I can take from one PC to another.

I don't know anything about programming languages and I am not used to working with a command line interface, so please recommend a distro in which I can do just about anything from the graphical interface without needing to go into text mode or add little textfiles with code do customize things. I'm willing to learn to work with any new graphical OS as long as it doesn't require me to learn any type of code, I simply don't have the time to do that. I'm a computer user, not a computer programmer. I realise it's going to take some effort to install everything correctly, but once that phase is over, everyone with half a brain should be able to figure out how to work with the OS.

The USB stick is 8GB, I would like to keep 5 gig available as storage space, so nothing which is a lot more than 3gig installed please.

Which linux distro would you advise me to use?
Oh, and, while we're at it, what program should I use to mimick Windows for picky software?

Thanks a lot, any advice is welcome.

Puppy Linux is the best for this kind of stuff.

www.puppylinux.org/

there are "fatter" versions if you want.

I tried Puppy Linux burned on a CD, because I wanted to try it first before searching a way to put the ISO on my USB stick correctly.

When it boots, I always get the same error: "can't acces tty; job control turned off"

I googled the error and found quite a lot of similar cases. They suggest trying the command "acpi=off irqpoll" or "acpi=force irqpoll" or "nacpitimer irqpoll" before booting, but I still get the same error when I try either of these three, on either my laptop or one of the two PC's in my home. Has anybody got any idea what might fix this?

Any other distro's I should check out? It doesn't need to be a minimalist OS, as far as I know bigger OS's often support more hardware without fiddling with driver packages etc., I can miss about 3gig on my thumbdrive.

[BiOPSY]

Try this before fucking with anything else:
https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/...reator-2.7.zip

Extract the ZIP file and run the program in Windows.
Here is the rest of the website should you need assistance, if you need further information, report back to this forum.

https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator

My first guess why the kernel message for the non-accessible TTY and job control error is probably the failure to access /dev/console for some reason, that or some dumb shit I can't fathom at the moment without more information from your system or how you did anything.