On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 07:21:39AM -0800, Matthew Walker wrote:
> This was discussed at the Dunedin meeting, (rather
> briefly), and I wanted to pass on the link. Any chance
> we can get an update on the suncoastlug.org site under
> the 'distributions' section?
Definite possibility. Good idea.
> Also, with the propensity of main memory to grow and
> grow in capacity - does this concept make as much
> sense to everyone else as it does to me? How much of
> the CD's contents are stored into main memory? If very
> little, then possibly the IO with a CD drive is *less*
> efficient than that of a Hard Drive, rendering this
> entire discussion irrelevant. Despite that there is
> the obvious benefit of being able to quickly and
> efficiently boot any PC with your customized linux OS
> profile.
Only enough is stored in memory to run the distro. Plus any swap needed.
FWIW, I had taken one of these home to see what the product looked like.
I had had a problem with one of my hard drives for a while, and I broke
down my computer to troubleshoot it. Unfortunately, even with my
assortment of boot/rescue disks, I couldn't get a satisfactory boot. I
had run the Knoppix just before this, so I rebooted with the Knoppix CD
in. I was able to reconfigure lilo and adjust some things so the machine
would boot. It used the existing Linux swap partition I had. Most
one-floppy rescue distros contain a collection of reduced-capability
tools (like ash and busybox). But this environment contained _all_ the
tools necessary to satisfactorily whack away at the problem. And it
recognized all but my sound card, which even Debian 3.0 has trouble
with.
Now, to be fair, I'm running a Pentium I, 133MHz machine with 133M
memory and a 52X CD-ROM. Knoppix ran like a dawg in X Window. Starting
up Open Office tooks many minutes. But then, this class of machine is
several generations old.
In all, a nice environment, particularly on a heftier machine than mine.
Paul
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