What is the best setup for my situation?

[Cantide5ga]

I've had a fair share of experience with Unix, but am humble and didn't see a better place to put this.

Bear with me here:

I am in a situation where I will be without owning a computer for a while. I have a 16GB SDHC which uses very little space for music/photos/game-saves and I wanted to use it along with a USB card reader to boot into a Live USB distro. I've tested with Ubuntu flavors and things work great. But after doing some reading, I found that the constant read and write is hard on any flash drive (not to my surprise).

I have decided to use a LiveCD instead, and see if I can allow persistence on my USB/SDHC setup instead. I absolutely need to virtualize a Windows XP machine within the Linux distro and be able to save some stuff.

For starters, what is the best distro for me? I'll be using it mostly for programming and the shell, so a fancy desktop isn't really needed (but man does Ubuntu look nice). I'm just making sure I can install and run programs from an SDHC in the way that I want.

Any other comments about this task are appreciated as well.

[markcole]

Have you thought about a external drive. You can get fairly large ones (in capacity, not physical size) and just put a full install on it and have the storage you need as well.

[Cantide5ga]

Have you thought about a external drive. You can get fairly large ones (in capacity, not physical size) and just put a full install on it and have the storage you need as well.

Oh yeah, that has been considered. I'm just being difficult and wanting to use what I already have

[markcole]

Well, you should be able to do what you plan. You can even put a small build of linux on the SDHC. Best distro is personal choice. Unless you are short on space, most should work for your needs.