Friday midmorning one of my laptop hd's got munged somehow- it's been replaced and forensics are upcoming. The result was a need to resume using that laptop ASAP. I recalled having made a DSL keychain install several meetings ago so I dug out that USB drive and the fun began. This notebook is too old to boot from USB. Up till recently making a linux boot floppy seemed doomed to arcana. RAWRITE/TGZ etc and nonstandard floppy sizes pretty well says "ubergeeken only" to the mundanes viewing the directions. 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, Plugged the USB drive in this laptop, inserted the floppy- booted into DSL which I am now using to post this. It is faster than the cd based DSL and seems pretty freeze or balk resistant so far.
For my mundane taskings of webmail,Google,Ebay etc it's been quite acceptable to even impressive at times. Sadly there are some employer demanded Citrix tools that seem to be not Linux compatible. Other than that issue I could consider literally not bothering to install to HD unless somehow forced to! Which brings me to the next contender for a daily use OS on this laptop.
Puppy Linux running from a CDR or CDRW that was rercorded as multisession.
Certain concepts will hatch independent of any person claiming to have "thought of that first" Though some foilks on this list will recall my importuning the coders among us to enable "write back to a Knoppix CDR" Uh, IIRC that was maybe 2+ years ago? Ah well- the Puppy team has delivered and more on that concept. In an "on disk" footprint close to that of DSL we have a Ramdisk loading Knoppix/Debian derived distro. One that inherently allows removal of the Puppy cd after it loads itsellf into Ramspace.. There is a setup dialog almost close to non tech user viable but still needing some decrufting. Details in a seperate deconstructions report in progress for both of tthese distros, 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.
The same for the netprobe script- a few changes and it could become press any key upon seeing the "no interface found" message. Repeating that till the next message giving choices for DHCP etc prompts for human aid again. The slickest part however was the save to cd mode actually remembers all the net and video settings!
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. 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. Most of the above comments have been extracted largely from current experiments Friday 1100 to now.
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.
Oren Beck
"Sometimes we need to use a computer and not flog obstacles- for that task I suggest Livecds or USB distros"