My "dream" development environment

My boss keeps telling me to leave my laptop and get onto a desktop
machine. I agree, desktops are more powerful and rather sturdier than
laptops. But my laptop gives me freedom to work from anywhere. I can
work from home if i want (Well.. maybe at least sometimes! :D) I have
all the resources that i need wherever I go. But its really frustrating
when I try running heavy applications on my laptop. I feel I really need to get
on to a powerful machine. But then I loose all my freedom of working
from anywhere.

Recently I just gave this whole idea a thought! Well, what do i really
need is a powerful hardware! What if I can carry my whole Operating
System with me wherever I go? such that I use only the computing power
of the hardware but the operating system (and the whole environment) is
what remains the same. Then I came across a USB disk, one sent to me by
my Dad. The specialty with this USB disk is it actually uses memory
card. So that you can plug in any memory card into it and use it as a
pen drive. For long I have known a Linux distribution aimed at being
really small. Its called Damn Small Linux (DSL). It has also got XFace
windowing system and is really damn small in size. Major feature of DSL
is that it can start from within Windows or even within Linux. So what
has this all to do with my dream development environment?

Well, if I can put all these pieces together, I can build my "dream"
development environment! Say I have a memory card of 5G. I use my funky
USB Disk to connect that to my computer. I can install DSL or in fact
any other distribution on this USB disk. I can setup my whole
development environment on the same. Since I have got 5G which I suppose
is plenty of space, (Even if you dont agree) I can setup all the stuff I
want like Java, Eclipse, Browser etc. I just have to make sure that I
have driver for most of the hardware. I take this little USB disk to any
machine which can boot from USB (Not necessary if I install DSL), I boot
to my very own portable development environment!

Sounds amusing isn't it? But reading or writing stuff to this memory
card maybe very slow and loading, saving applications can also be
considerably slow. But I wouldn't bother to compromise on that if I have
so very portable environment with me. Surely comfortable and easy to
carry. Well only thing which can bother me now is my USB disk crashes. I
think we are not very long from an era where computing power will be
provided like service, and your software (my USB disk in this case) will
be something you store on Internet. The computer will be a very light
front-end on top of all these services.