Good, Portable "Virtual" Linux Distro?

Prof. Nix writes "I have been given the opportunity to redesign the Linux course for the community college I work for. This course will be taking students from the 'What's Lee-nux?' stage to (hopefully) Linux+ Certifiable in about three to four months. However, one issue I haven't solved is finding a semi-stable, highly portable, and readily accessible platform the students may pound on, and have root access, independently of their peers. The powers-that-be have already vetoed any sort of server environment accessible from off campus. We've already tried live USB drives, but we ran into many issues with non-supported hardware on students' home computers. So I'm left with the idea of virtual machines run from flash drives. My ultimate goal is to have some sort of portable system that students can use with equal ease on lab systems and personal laptops — regardless of hardware. Preferably this system would be installable on a 4GB flash drive and run an Ubuntu- or Fedora-derived OS. So I ask the people who have been in the trenches a lot longer than I — what distros should I look at?"

Ubuntu on Ubuntu with Virtualbox

[commport1]

You could think about running 'Ubuntu on Ubuntu' - as both the main desktop OS, and another copy in a VM running VirtualBox. Anything they're trying for the first time, or that has the possibility to go wrong, they can do on the VM and snapshot + remove it as required. Once they are more capable, maybe they can start to perform tasks on the Desktop copy. If anything goes wrong and the workstation needs to be re-imaged, there's a chance the VM could be be backed up (so the work is not lost) and it's also portable, so it can be used at home.

Depends on the Course

[Ohio Calvinist]

I teach at the community college myself, and find that installing the OS is a really important part of learning to use it (creating partitions, mount points, swap, etc...) and is one of the first part that makes it very different from most Windows installation processes. Doing the install on a USB stick could result in students killing the Windows partition on the disk if they botch the install and accidentally put it on the hard disk. (I've had it happen).

Using a VM host on the lab computers (either MS Virtual PC or VMWare; assuming that your lab PCs are Windows) and then allowing them to create the virtual disk on their 4GB (or larger) flash disks will give them the install experience (without risk of damaging the host system), and allow their install to be fairly hardware independent (assuming they have the same VM host on their home PC.)

This also allows them to use a normal, general purpose distro than a stick-oriented one, that is also likely to have better textbooks available. I know any text should be good enough for derived distributions, but for students having an out-of-the-box or off-the-iso experience can alleviate a lot of first-week frustrations, and gives them a better (vanilla) resource to consult when bad things happen.

Re:Virtual Box

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to the idea of using the thumb drive. Lesson one becomes how to troubleshoot and resolve hardware incompatibility issues with this installation. This will be a common issue pragmatically in the workforce that would want a Linux+ certification. As a bonus, your ivory tower academics might get exposed to real challenges of dealing with an operating system with such little market share.

So, "Linux+ Certifiable" means...

[Anonymous Coward]

...someone has had about 3-4 months of experience with Linux. Wow. That's almost as meaningful than the V.I.P. award I received in kindergarten!

Re:Virtual Box

[Ian Alexander]

Great idea. Make the students waste their time fucking around just getting the thing up and running so they can start studying while every day the quarter slips away more and more. A virtual image is a great idea - hardware incompatibilities can happen at any level of the system (kernel, X.org, HAL/DeviceKit/CUPS/SANE regressions, etc, etc), so I think a good working knowledge of Linux is probably a prerequisite to troubleshooting hardware incompatibilities. Let the students actually understand what the kernel is and how modules work before making them go fetch sources to compile kernel modules.

Re:Virtual Box

[element-o.p.]

...with such little market share.

Insightful? Seriously? That's blatant flamebait.

Re:Virtual Box

[jumpingfred]

I don't think community college is what people mean when they talk about the ivroy tower.

Re:Virtual Box

[Hurricane78]

You say that as if it were a good thing to learn and understand absolutely nothing about the devices you’you using.
Basically this behavior trains people to play with colorful clickables on what is essentially only an appliance.
And then you act surprised, that everyone that calls you when you work in tech support, is a fuckin’ moron...

Sorry, it’s your own damn fault.

Virtualbox

[Boyne7]

I would definitely recommend that you use Virtualbox (as many other have recommended) as it is a fully featured desktop virtualization environment and is free as opposed to vmware workstation which offers similar features. This would also allow the more adventurous of your students to create their own virtual machines and try out different distributions. To me, part of learning linux lies in learning the differences and quirks of each of the popular distributions. Obviously learning how to use bash and use the core linux kernel is going to be the most important, but learning the difference between apt and yum, etc. are also important. As for the best distribution to use for such a class, I would have to go with ubuntu as it is definitely the most popular growing linux distribution available, this would also allow for a massive amount of information and documentation online in order for students to do their own troubleshooting, etc.