Krystalin-USB: Portable, Powerful, Easy to Use

Imagine something you can carry on your keychain that makes nearly any computer YOUR computer....

Krystalin-USB^™ is a USB Flash Drive pre-loaded with a state-of-the-art Linux Operating System (based on Ubuntu 8.10 in our first release) specially modified and configured to run well from a USB drive on a wide range of hardware. All you need is a USB-bootable PC-compatible computer with at least 384MB RAM (and it may work on less.) No complicated or time consuming installation hassle.

It's almost like taking your computer with you in your pocket! All your files and programs are always where you expect them to be, set up the way you had them, on any computer you boot up with your Krystalin-USB.

You can use Krystalin-USB to bring new life to old hardware or a computer degraded or "ruined" by viruses or spyware—everything on the internal hard disk is bypassed entirely! Krystalin-USB is configured so that unless you give the machine commands to do so, the hard disk is ordinarily left untouched (it can even work on a machine without a hard disk or with a broken hard disk.) Great for sharing a computer! Great for travelling light!

Running from a USB flash drive often delivers markedly improved performance on any given machine (...it was put together on a three year old laptop, 1.8GHz/640MB, on which it's simply smooth.) You can probably find a used laptop within most budgets, use it with Krystalin-USB and get much better bang-for-the-buck! And if a computer breaks...just find a new one and everything is still on the Krystalin-USB drive...change or switch machines almost effortlessly!

And it's preloaded with the easy-to-use Gnome Desktop, OpenOffice.org (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, etc., Firefox web browser, gIMP Image Processor, and other software for just about every common use, all up to date for security fixes. On top of the widely respected security of Linux, it has anti-virus and firewall software. For kids, it's got MIT's Scratch (makes it easy for kids to learn to write interative games) and Sugar (the system used on the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop.) For bleeding-edge power users, it's loaded with programming languages, tools and utilities like GCC 4.3.2, g++, gfortran, Python 2.5.2, Idle—all of the basics and much more—everything needed to get down to coding.

Ubuntu is a Registered Trademark of Canonical, Ltd.., Linux is a Registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds, and these are refered to only for purpose of description and to give credit; no endorsement should be construed.

Krystalin and Krystalin-USB are Trademarks of Hard Times Survival Corporation

More about Sugar at http://sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page.

Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. See http://scratch.mit.edu.

Copyright © 2008 Hard Times Survival Corporation.