Friday midmorning one of my laptop hd's got munged somehow- it's been replaced and forensics are upcoming.<br>
The result was a need to resume using that laptop ASAP.<br>
I recalled having made a DSL keychain install several meetings ago so I dug out that USB drive and the fun began.<br>
This notebook is too old to boot from USB. Up till recently making a linux boot floppy seemed doomed to arcana.<br>
RAWRITE/TGZ etc and nonstandard floppy sizes pretty well says "ubergeeken only" to the mundanes viewing the directions.<br>
THIS time I Googled and found there was a downloadable floppy image
tool that just plain worked. used a windows box to make the floppy,<br>
Plugged the USB drive in this laptop, inserted the floppy- booted into DSL which I am now using to post this. <br>
It is faster than the cd based DSL and seems pretty freeze or balk resistant so far. <br>
<br>
For my mundane taskings of webmail,Google,Ebay etc it's been quite acceptable to even impressive at times.<br>
Sadly there are some employer demanded Citrix tools that seem to be not Linux compatible. <br>
Other than that issue I could consider literally not bothering to install to HD unless somehow forced to!<br>
Which brings me to the next contender for a daily use OS on this laptop.<br>
<br>
Puppy Linux running from a CDR or CDRW that was rercorded as multisession.<br>
<br>
Certain concepts will hatch independent of any person claiming to have "thought of that first"<br>
Though some foilks on this list will recall my importuning the coders among us to enable "write back to a Knoppix CDR" <br>
Uh, IIRC that was maybe 2+ years ago? Ah well- the Puppy team has delivered and more on that concept.<br>
In an "on disk" footprint close to that of DSL we have a Ramdisk loading Knoppix/Debian derived distro.<br>
One that inherently allows removal of the Puppy cd after it loads itsellf into Ramspace..<br>
There is a setup dialog almost close to non tech user viable but still needing some decrufting. <br>
Details in a seperate deconstructions report in progress for both of tthese distros, <br>
It can be still observed that video defaults going to test then asking
" do you see me now?"-fall back on no response is needed at times. <br>
<br>
The same for the netprobe script- a few changes and it could become press any key upon seeing the "no interface found" message.<br>
Repeating that till the next message giving choices for DHCP etc prompts for human aid again. <br>
The slickest part however was the save to cd mode actually remembers all the net and video settings!<br>
<br>
I am going to alternate between these distros for some time now and see
if some "grafting" tools from one into the other will bear better
fruits.<br>
EX: Puppy has a save tool that may be back graftable to DSL and DSL has
the infinitely underrated "Xkill" utility that I have not yet found in
puppy. Frankly speaking- Xkill would be a desktop mandatory app if I
ever presume to whack on a distro that hard.<br>
Most of the above comments have been extracted largely from current experiments Friday 1100 to now.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
In summary - on this pentium 500 laptop with 258 mb ram both distros
were quite acceptable for every non windows bound task I needed this
weekend.. They just plain worked and worked well. There IS a bit of
learning curve to access and use files on another drive or network
location witth the tools in these distros, but that's still not a deal
breaker. <br>
<br>
<br>
Oren Beck<br>
<br>
"Sometimes we need to use a computer and not flog obstacles- for that task I suggest Livecds or USB distros"<br>