Consequently, we here at ITWire have two recommendations which will give you peace of mind through a secure and anonymous bootable Linux setup.

Firstly, to solve the problem of using a CD, consider a USB-bootable Linux distribution. These are specially built distros that have been cut down to minimal size. This runs a risk of not having an application you want but being on USB, you are able to add it and tailor the environment as desired subject to constraints. For instance, such tiny Linux versions will generally have just one window manager rather than the five or more which usually ship.

One such miniscule Linux is Feather Linux which takes up less than 128Mb - a trifling size for today's USB drives. Download the distribution and unzip it to a USB drive. Next download SYSLinux - and run the command SYSLINUX E: in Windows or syslinux /dev/sda1 in Linux (replacing E: or /dev/sda1 for the drive letter or location of your USB stick.) This makes the USB drive bootable. It's worth testing it right away; if you find your computer won't boot, check the BIOS settings to ensure that USB is listed as a boot option before the hard drive. Secondly, try running syslinux again with the -s flag. This makes it install a safer (but slower) boot loader which may work on some older machines.

Another tiny distro option is PuppyOS. It is also lightweight, taking no more than 128Mb space. Nicely, it boasts faster run-time performance because it uses available RAM as a virtual hard drive, loading all apps required into memory. Only 128Mb RAM is required, which is a fairly safe memory requirement for most computers built within the last decade. PuppyOS has a more streamlined installation process; download the installer and it will both load all the necessary files onto a USB drive as well as make it bootable.

Now, with a bootable Linux USB drive, there is still one more recommendation for total safety and anonymity and that is to use Tor. Tor was originally designed by the U.S. military but has since become co-founded and promoted by privacy advocates Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF). Tor is described as a multi-onion-layered system, which describes its anonymising processes that route traffic three times through random nodes on its way between clients and servers. This makes it very difficult for anyone to track down the identity of the person browsing.

Tor can be freely downloaded. It requires some configuration which is largely straightforward through its bundled tools. You will need to run privoxy, a filtering web proxy, and then the torbutton plugin for Firefox. If you do not use Firefox, or wish to route other apps through Tor, all that is really required is to find where configuration options allow for a proxy to be specified; use localhost, port 8118, and then all your traffic will wend through Tor.

Be warned that Tor can be very slow at times, as a direct consequence of the way it works. Nevertheless, if you want a complete, straightforward mechanism to browse the Web securely without leaving any trace on either the computer or the Internet, you need look no further than a Live Linux distro coupled with Tor.

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