Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Day Brown wrote:

> If anyone came out with a rescue system that not only booted from the FD
> or CD, but also automatically mounted all the drives it could find
> (win/dos users dont havta 'mount' drives), and then got online with a
> gui browser, many would never bother with trying to install windoz
> again. All they want from the computer is surfing and email. But it'd
> havta run mozilla or opera or some other gui browser that was similar
> enough to win IE that they could get by without having to deal with the
> notorious steep Linux learning curve.
>
> and to *do* that, it'd havta cope with xf86config. which is archaic and
> clunky. I dunno how many times I had a video problem, but still hadda go
> thru all the mouse and kybd setup, and then if I didnt get the monitor
> or video card just right, havta go back and do it all, all over again.
> And even right now, no matter what I do to xf86config, I cant get this
> corel/debian to default to the hires; it always comes up in 640x480. I
> like Mandrake, but there are some video cards that it never could get
> right. I've seen some xf86config not work, and not only not work, but
> screw up the *text mode screen* as well, making it blink so bad it was
> easier to just reformat the damn drive.
>
Yer behind the times, Day.  There are many Linux "live CD" distros that do
this - Knoppix chief among them.  Its plug and play capapbilities are
really on a par with M$ stuff.  I don't know about automounting
drives/partitions: this is probably considered unsafe for obvious reasons.
But in Knoppix all partitions found show up as icons on the desktop that
get mounted when clicked.  It will set up your modem (if it's not a
winmodem, but you have to know the COM port it's on to use it) and NIC if
you use dhcp.  It's pretty incredible how well it works: just stick it in
the drive and boot.  Autogenerates an XF86Config.  Takes plenty of RAM,
though (128MB minimum) . Anyway, many other live CD distros are based on
it, some for lower resource systems, like DamnSmallLinux.  Then, there are
the "business card CD" class rescue disks.  These typcially focus on
rescue tools that work in console mode, but I think some of them have gui
capabilities.  It's quite a wide world out there on the live CD/ rescue CD
front, Day.  Check it out some time.

James