All on a flash drive: Geek post.

Post by **Dale** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 2:33 pm

You know, I have to admit that I've never been able to work up a good head of righteous indignation over Microsoft. This is probably been true, at least in part, because I have a whistle-playing friend at Microsoft who has been helpful to me. I mean, I tend to be a bit suspicious of big companies but, hey, you know, the products generally work for me. Accordingly, I've been slow to jump on the Open Source bandwagon, although I kinda like the idea in principle and I do use some of their stuff regularly.

That said, this appeals to me:

http://tinyurl.com/dj9m6

This slashdot entry is about these very small Linux installations that are available. The idea is that they are so small they can be contained on a single disk, or a thumb drive, as well as a computer hardrive, along with a variety of open source applications that pretty much cover every need. The whole thing then, breathes new life into older computers which can't handle the resource-tapping characteristics of Windows and associated applications such as Office. Anyway, makes for interesting reading. I'm looking at Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux as a way to rejuvenate a couple of older computers I have.

Dale

Congratulations · Post by **Congratulations** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 3:13 pm

I've played with Damn Small Linux a bit, and I rather enjoyed it. Of course, this was on my uber-high-powered desktop monstrosity, booted from CD, so I don't know about how it performs on older systems. Wonderful idea, though.

beowulf573 · Post by **beowulf573** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 4:50 pm

I use Damn Small Linux just because I'm too cheap to buy another laptop to replace the one I use to browse/check email while sitting on the couch. (breathe) Works like a champ.

Although, I really would like one of those nice shiny powerbooks.

Feadin · Post by **Feadin** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 5:05 pm

DSL is great, it works fine with older PCs and it's a good way to get used to linux, too. I'm a Windows and Linux administrator at work, but at home I only use Linux with Fluxbox, wich is the same WM that DSL uses... it's small, fast, clean and simple.
Linux has so many things I like, that there's no coming back to Windows for me now... sure it takes some time to get used to it, but it's worth every minute.

Daniel_Bingamon · Post by **Daniel_Bingamon** » Mon Nov 28, 2005 9:41 pm

I have a Linux system here setting next to my Windows Machine. The Linux box is running Knoppix. Knoppix is nice that it can run directly off of a CD.

The small Linuxes are nice for old computers that could be put to special tasks. Computers in the shop can interfaced to tools for X, Y readouts, logging notes. At home, you could use one as a printer server or just put the hard drive on your home network and act as a quick backup device.

mrosenlof · Post by **mrosenlof** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 7:04 pm

I have a couple of old machines, a 266MHz Pentium II, 300 MHz Pentium III and a 366 Celeron running various flavors of "full featured" linux. You'll need a couple Gig of disk space for the OS, but you're not bad off with a 4Gig disc unless you want audio or video on the thing.

If you're web surfing or word processing, these machines are pretty decent with OpenOffice and firefox, and dirt cheap now.

Damn Small Linux is OK, but if you have 125MB or better of RAM, and say 4G of disk, you can run something like ubuntu.

The hard thing about most linux on a thumb drive is that most of the old machines won't boot from a USB drive. The BIOS won't support it.

tuaz · Post by **tuaz** » Wed Nov 30, 2005 12:04 am

mrosenlof wrote:I have a couple of old machines, a 266MHz Pentium II, 300 MHz Pentium III and a 366 Celeron running various flavors of "full featured" linux. You'll need a couple Gig of disk space for the OS, but you're not bad off with a 4Gig disc unless you want audio or video on the thing.

If you're web surfing or word processing, these machines are pretty decent with OpenOffice and firefox, and dirt cheap now.

Damn Small Linux is OK, but if you have 125MB or better of RAM, and say 4G of disk, you can run something like ubuntu.

The hard thing about most linux on a thumb drive is that most of the old machines won't boot from a USB drive. The BIOS won't support it.

Are you (or anyone else) familiar with (K)Ubuntu? I've been trying the last 5 days to install Kubuntu as a dual boot OS on my machine, to no avail. It's frustrating me to no end. I've tried checking FAQs and asking for help on Ubuntu forums but the FAQs aren't on point and no one has answered me yet.

If anyone can help me, could you please PM me?