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Domain: toms.net

Stories and comments across the archive that link to toms.net.

Stories · 3

  1. USB Key Multitool?

    Hardware · Hardhack · · posted by Cliff · from the booting-from-multiple-images dept. · 34 comments
    srhuston asks: "I've got a USB key that I use for booting and installing machines (GRUB boots and pulls the rest from the network). This got me thinking, all the floppy disks and CDs that I use for various tasks, such as memtest86, SuperRescue, Plan-B, tomsrtbt and others with which I'd like to experiment, I could probably get a larger key and put a few of them on there. The problem is booting them all - it seems that unless I copy the contents of the CD to the key, I wouldn't be able to boot it properly, and doing that means I can only use one of them at a time and have to copy another to the key when I want to use it. Ideally I'd love to be able to have my GRUB menu (or something similar) pop up, and select which of the items I want to boot. Any ideas how I might accomplish this? GRUB doesn't seem to support booting an image (floppy or ISO), and ISOLINUX seems to want to boot just one image and not give options for multiple ones. Oh, and yes, I did look first and found more questions than answers."

  2. Single Floppy Unix Clones For Mac?

    Ask · Linux · · posted by Cliff · from the smaller-is-sometimes-better dept. · 7 comments
    tangsoodo asks: "It's easy to find 1 floppy Linux distributions like Tomsrtbt or Trinux, but they seem to only run on PC's... are there any 1 or few floppy distributions of Linux or even a BSD that run on 68k or PPC Macs? Yes, I know new Macs don't have floppy drives, but there are tons of older Macs still being used in schools and libraries, and running off a floppy is probably the easiest way to experiment with the Unices without messing with the hard drive."

  3. Why Do Most Linux Distributions Use LiLo?

    Ask · Linux · · posted by Cliff · from the defying-convention dept. · 32 comments
    sPaKr asks: "Why do we still use LiLo? I have recently installed FreeBSD, and and the boot loader that comes with latest release seems very powerful: it allows me to navigate the disk, preload kernels and modules at boot time and if I make kernel changes but forget to make changes to the loader configuration file I can still boot into a stable system (even though this can be fixed by having a handy boot disk aka tomsrtbt). I have conducted a quick search and find that there are several replacement loaders for Linux, (ie. grub, uniload). Why is it that most distributions ship with LiLo when we can find stable and more feature-rich replacments?"