Good, Portable "Virtual" Linux distro?

Prof. Nix writes: I have been gifted the opportunity to re-design 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 common issue I've run into is getting a semi-stable, highly portable, and readily accessible platform the students may on independently of their peers and have root access. 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 students home computers having much non-supported hardware. So in my mind then I'm largely left with the idea of virtual machines run from flash drives.

What my ultimate goal is to have some sort of method that regardless of hardware that students can have a portable system that they could use with equal ease on lab systems and personal laptops — again regardless of hardware. Preferably this system would be able to be installed 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 more than I — what should I look at?

Ubuntu + Wubi

[fireman sam]

For the windows users. As I am not a Mac user, I cannot comment on a Mac equivalent.

4GB necessary?

[watanabe]

If 4GB isn't necessary, I think the clear answer would be virtualbox running Ubuntu. 4GB would be tight, but 8GB would do nicely, 16GB even better.

You could put the virtualbox installers for OS X, and Windows on the USB sticks, and include a pre-setup Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04 (depending on when your class starts). You might need to include virtualbox source to comply with the license, or at least a link back to virtualbox.org.

Once nice thing about this approach is you could dump a few different images on there,

Re:

[watanabe]

Also, Ubuntu ONE means that if they were using it, they could just change out a thumb drive if it died. That would be nice.