A couple of weeks back I noticed that Windbringer was starting to act dodgy in the way that Dell laptops do when they're getting long in the tooth: USB trouble, wifi getting weird (he'd only connect to the legacy 802.11b network), power cell not charging fully and refusing to doo so... Dell is remarkbly consistent in this regard. Not too long after that a good friend of mine visited with one of their System76 laptops and let me tool around with it for a while. This started wheels turning in my head because I new that I was going …

Note: The purpose of this post is mostly to document how to reconfigure laptops like my mom's to boot from a flash drive. The actual imaging process is only parenthetically laid out. If you're in a position where this is something you find yourself doing chances are you're already a competant sysadmin and know how to use dd anyway. However, I can't just leave it unfinished.

Due to how many things are now inextricably tied to one's computers these days, from banking to paying bills, it seemed a good idea to back up my mom's laptop while I was in …