I recently followed some instructions for putting Damn Small Linux on a thumb drive and was suprised to find that the latest version easily boots inside of Windows and Linux as well as directly from the thumb drive.

Here are some screenshots of Damn Small Linux running inside of Ubuntu Linux. Notice the window borders:

A few people have asked me how to install Linux to a bootable thumb drive. I carry around Damn Small Linux on my thumb drive and it works great. It only takes up 50MB on my 256MB thumb drive, which leaves me about 200MB free for my other files.

With Damn Small Linux, you just download it and burn the Linux file to a CD. Then boot the computer from the CD drive and use the menu option to install Damn Small Linux to the thumb drive.

I just found this great resource on how to install Linux to thumb drives: pendrivelinux.com. I haven't installed Linux to a thumb drive with any distro except for Damn Small Linux, and I'm looking forward to trying some of the methods mentioned on pendrivelinux.com.