Making the commitment to partition your precious laptop’s hard disk in order to install the Ubuntu Linux operating system is not always an easy thing to do. This tutorial will describe in detail how to install Kubuntu on a removable 4GB USB flash drive, and configure the bootloader to boot Linux whenever the drive is connected.

Lately I have been fooling around with Kubuntu on a desktop computer and I really wanted to use it on my laptop. However, I was hesitant to partition my hard drive because I have a lot of documents and pictures and software that I would hate to lose in the event something went wrong. Additionally, I don’t have a tremendous amount of free space on my hard drive to devote to another operating system. So I decided to try to install Kubuntu on a USB flash drive.

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Ah, the good old days: sitting in a dank corner of the university library on a rock-solid UNIX terminal, emailing far-away friends with Pine, the coolest email client ever made.

Unfortunately, Pine is not included in the Ubuntu repositories, so if you want it, you have to find it and install it yourself. I really wanted to use Pine to access Gmail via POP3. The following instructions will help you download and install Pine on Kubuntu and configure it as a POP client for your Gmail account.

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I just reinstalled Kubuntu 7.04 on the Linux box after having upgraded successively from Ubuntu 6.06. I wanted to clean house a bit and get rid of any unnecessary Gnome leftovers. While setting things up I was trying to remember how I had gotten the little system tray application checkgmail to run at startup every time.

This flummoxed me for several hours, while I surfed the web and the Ubuntu forums. I found a reasonably relevant FAQ here, but that only dealt with the Gnome desktop or with running a script at boot time, which I did not want either. Anyway, to make a long story short, I eventually remembered the KDE solution to the problem, and I’ll post it here so I don’t forget again.

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