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SuperSlak - Linux On A SuperDisk
_EternaL_ writes: "What could be more fun then hitting the eject button on your floppy drive, and swapping out your root file system? You say you don't wanna partition your hard drive to play with Linux? That's no excuse, install to your superdisk! Now there's a solution for anyone interested in getting a feel for Linux that doesn't have the space or time to install Linux on a hard drive, but has a Superdisk drive! Folks out there might be interested in knowing that installation to an internal ls120 (ie: SuperDisk) is possible. It took a bit of work, but thanks to moomonk it's fairly easy. You might wanna check out the basic howto over at electricgod.net. If that's not working out for you, you can also try over at dokks.com!"
Why would people, especially those that use linux and know it at all, be surprised at all? Linux can be installed to *any* media where the appropriate drivers (read: kernel code) exists.
Zip. Superdisk. Floppies. M-systems Disk-on-chip, hard disk, network boot.... all kinds of flash...
Seriously.. where's the news?
And now everyone is amazed that Linux can fit on an LS120.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
There are apparently several versions of the ORB drive. SCSI, IDE, USB, AND FireWire. I've heard that the speed is pretty good on this thing, and the price is hard to beat too. $30 for a 2.2GB disk. $199 for the drive with a disk. So, does anyone know if there are or will be Linux drivers for it?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Last time I checked to get an accelerated X server, true type font support, wysiwyg text editing, an integrated desktop environment, you needed a fairly sizable install of linux.
Certainly windows wont do servers or routing particularly well. Actually winroute is only 700k and works adequately, but the bulk of routing and fileserving on our home network is done by our linux machine - and the correllary - the bulk of client machines run windows.
A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.
At one point i had about a 16 Meg zip file, which extracted to a 32mb ram disk, which I then was able to start Win95 from in safe mode. Sadly I never acheived full graphical mode since it would have been ideal for pissing about on the university networks :)
Been there, done that. If you have a reasonably recent MB and an IDE (or SCSI :-) ZIP disk you can install a "minimal" Debian system to a ZIP - and later boot from it.
Instant monster rescue disk!
It's even better than that, because a minimal Debian install is only 25 MB or so, so you can stuff the remaining 75 MB or so with almost anything you can imagine. You don't have enough disk space to rebuild the kernel, X11, or glibc, but you definitely have enough room to have a reasonably complete compiler set that will allow you to build/rebuild any reasonably sized program. That's a lot more than you can say about 1-3 floppy rescue disks!
I haven't played with the 250 MB ZIP drives (the ATAPI ones just came out), but I have put ATAPI ZIP drives into all of my systems (except the laptop) specifically because they have proven themselves so useful when things go horribly wrong. In fact, I've even swapped out the floppy drive for the ZIP drive in most of those systems!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just a rehash of ZipSlack? ZipSlack has been around for a LONG time, and fits on a 100MB disk. Sure, if you want to use an LS-120 drive instead, you might need to mess with some configuration, but it's still basically the same deal. No real news here at all.
moomonk here (eternal & dokks can vouch for that). I didn't have this ready for release when I just noticed the story on /.. Damn ;-) Well anywhoo... This is really three things. At color.gz: A replacement for Slackware's color.gz root disk that will install directly to an ATA floppy drive (could be Zip if you felt like it). I didn't get around to putting the support for creating swap files on the root device so you'll have to do that yourself. Besides that it works peachy. Linux works much better on an ext2 filesystem then UMSDOS on a superdisk. I had X running with Mozilla off a disk from this earlier last week. It's slick for having a quickie system. par-pf.i: Almost like Slackware's paride.i boot disk except that it actually works. The Slackware boot disk includes the driver for paride CD/IDE/ATA floppy/ATA disk/ATA generic and the combination of them all breaks the disk. This only loads the ATA floppy driver but is otherwise identical. suprdisk.txt: Some notes on installing several distributions directly to a SuperDisk. In general, Debian and Slackware can be coerced (and with color.gz Slack even likes it). Mandrake and Red Hat were plain broken and aren't worth bothering with. SuSe also worked nice but was too large to be useful. In general, the idea to tricking the installer is to mount the superdisk at the installation mount point and then get the installer to ignore any linux partitions. You can get Slackware to install using the default color.gz if you have a linux partition and just mount the disk at /mnt. The installer doesn't need to touch the linux partition, it just needs to see one. For debian mount the disk at /target, skip the install section, ignore the error and then continue. The most important bit wasn't done at all. H. Peter Anvin's SYSLINUX works really slick if you have a UMSDOS file system like ZipSlack. Just unzip ZipSlack to the floppy, unzip 120linux.zip to the floppy and then run the syslinux program on the disk. The zip includes all the required configuration files. Under linux this is syslinux -s /dev/hd? where ? is a-d for a=primary, master b=primary, slave c=secondary, master d=secondary. If you'd like to have a ext2 file system you should use lilo. Go ahead and use a generic lilo configuration file. Just be sure to include this additional bit: disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd The idea is to trick the boot loader to access the floppy device on boot. The linux kernel will get it right later so you'll set your root to something like /dev/hdc or the ilk. My lilo.conf looks like # LILO start prompt default=3 # because i like my configuration to boot nicely message=/boot/message.txt # it describes the images 1-4 compact image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda label=1 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb label=2 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc label=3 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdd label=4 single-key read-only disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd bios=0x00 #LILO end eternal may have mirred these files to electricgod.net but their home is on dokks.com
Push the eject button while they're not looking.
ls: command not foundIf you get a slackware distrib from CDROM.com you get a CD with a live filesystem too.
Click here.
It comes on a free CD.
It works, recognizes anything in your computer and it is fully featured (KDE, Emacs, Netscape, GCC, Perl, etc.).
I use it on sensible servers.
you only need to be able to boot on a CD.
BTW, who deliberately bought an LS, here ?
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Surely you cant boot from a USB ls-120 drive?!!
Emmm i've managed to get windows 95 to boot quite happily from an 100Mb disk.
:) and that includes a copy of wordpad which isn't too bad a text editor.
It's really quite simple... copy your windows directory to the A: drive, sys the A: drive to make it bootable, edit MSDOS.SYS to set the correct path up to find windows and you are set.
Something all you linux people do seem quite keen to forget is that m$ software is nowhere near as bloated as linux's. You can slim down a Win95 distribution and get it in 25 Megs I think. And that's a full graphical OS (well OS is too strong a word
this is pretty much zipslack but now it supports ls120 drives... Ok, if you have one it would be nice, but must people don't. What I find an even better idea is the linuxcare bootable business card. Take a look here. You just burn this iso image to a cd and you have a bootable linux that would work on a lot more machines than an ls120 or even a zip disk because its on a CD! Seeing as this is based off tomsrbt and made for business card size CD's there is plenty of room to add your own extras if you arent new to linux. I am thinking about adding soundcard support and throwing some mp3 files on it ;-)
_joshua_
Remember ZipSlack? It was quite similar, but used a 100 MB Zip disk. It also usd the UMSDOS filesystem, and thus could simply be placed into a Windows/DOS directory and used from there.
This is still cool, though, because I have an LS-120 and not a Zip drive.
J
Slackware is behind the race on some stuff, and
they only make an intel distro, but ZipSlack
and this SmartDisk Slack are among the most
handy things they've done... Portable Linux
is not to be underrated... I'm always
finding myself at hostile computers, and I
love just running my own little Linux on it
for a few minutes and then just rebooting
it and having it be none-the-wiser..
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
hey, if you flip the write protect tab on the disk, your installation would be pretty secure: if your ever compromised, take it off the net and reboot: it'll be back to the way it was. Then, patch the security hole that was exploited (with the write protect off) and bring it back online.
A SuperDisk is similar to a Zip disk. It has a capacity of 120 MB and looks very similar to a standard 3.5" floppy disk. (Actually, it's dimensions are identical, and the only real difference in appearance is the shutter.)
SuperDisk is an Imation technology. It's closed, which really sucks, because one of the reasons the 3.5" floppy because such a hit was because anyone could make them. Not so with the SuperDisk.
SuperDisks only work with SuperDisk drives, like the LS-120, although they will fit in a regular floppy drive. SuperDisk drives are also backwardly compatible with regular floppies. USB, parallel, serial and internal models are available.
I have one, but only because it was free. I find it useful for taking home big files from work, since I have a T1 connection at work and a 33.6 connection at home. I'm not a fan of the closed nature of Imation and their SuperDisks, but it comes in handy when I'm taking home 10 mp3s or some mpegs.
J
Can you have Linux boot and work off of
CD alone. I mean, no swap, no nothing,
never alter any settings for any reason.
Are there ISO images of such a beast?
After a flurry of announcements, and even one attempted release, I haven't heard anything more. If I could get one of these 200 Meg floppy drives for $200 I wouldn't think twice. Especially built into a VAIO. All I can say at this point is: what the???
And when are we going to see an *open* hi capacity floppy standard? Why haven't we seen it already?
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It may be closed, but at least it's affordable. The annoying thing about Zip disks is that they're unaccountably expensive. The drives themselves are coming in at a decent price, *finally*, since you can get a remanufactures ATAPI ZIP unit for $49.95 at CompUSA, but the disks are still way too expensive to be all that useful considering capacity of 100MB (the 250 MB drives and disks are both even more $$$).
I bought a parallel port unit a few years ago when I got my first computer, an ancient 486DX4/100 laptop. Aside from the 5-pack that came with it, I only ever bought 2 more disks--Fuji brand Zip 2-pack for $25. I finally got a real computer and added a CD burner, and the Zip unit sits atop my computer still, unused for at least a year and a half. The sad part is, until the last few months, Zip drives were still retailing for the same price I bought mine at a couple years ago, and disk prices have come down a bit but not much.
I'm really not a fan of Iomega: overpriced is their best descriptor. My friends with LS-120 SuperDisk drives actually use them a lot, what with much more affordable media and all, and the drives themselves have been at a great price for a while. Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Another way of partitionlessly installing Linux that a few distros (Mandrake and Suse, maybe others) are offering now is to use a loopback filesystem. I've had ZipSlack on my HD for a little bit and have become entirely too fed up with UMSDOS. So, with a little tweaking of the setup scripts, I installed LoopSlack to a 1.2G file. Kent Robotti has put together a prepackaged LoopLinux that is essentially the same thing.
Loopback-Root-FS-mini-HOWT O
LoopLinux
The easiest distribution to futz around with for stuff like this.
And if anyone cares to know what I did (which is a bit of a different approach than Kent took) feel free to ask.
And yes, this is also essentially what BeOS Personal does.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Yes, it is possible. Older SuSE-distributions (up to 6.0? AFAIK not in current distribution) were shipped with a "Live Filesystem" - a bootable CD with a Linux running completely from this CD. No need to have a HDD.
This is propably no replacement for a real installation, but sometimes (HDD crash, etc.) it can be quite usefull.
I don't know if there are any ISOs available.
I paid $49 for my 2x LS-120 drive. That's not much more than the cost of a plain ol' 1.44MB diskette drive.
When was the last time you shopped 1.44 disk drives? The Chip Merchant will sell you a 1.44 drive for $12US plus shipping.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Then, obviously, you can also do it with an IOMEGA Zip 250 disk drive cartridge, or Jaz (have those been discontinued yet?). Or, an ORB... I wish we had an industry standard form of removable small storage without licensor dominance by one company -- oh, yeah, a CD-R 650 to 700 MB disk. (Re)Writers can be purchased for a little more than Zip 100 or SuperDisk, media costs about $.40 cents in spindles of 100, and rewriteable (CD-RW) media is down to a dollar or less in bulk.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
But it might be useful if you need to be able to bring a Linux distro around with you. You can get a USB LS-120 drive for less than $150, and then you could plug that in to any PC with a USB port, given proper drivers for the PC and for Linux.
But 8 steps to get to (I presume) a command-line root prompt is too much for folks who want to try out the desktop. A better set-up for these folks would be something like the free BeOS download (BeOS Personal Edition), where it boots from a filesystem-in-a-file on you C:\ drive.
Another use for this would be for admins that want to switch their users over to Linux: if you've got low-end boxes without CD-ROM drives, or if you don't have a CD-Burner, or don't want to bother with a CD, just create a bootable SuperDisk and use that to fdisk and pull down the tools you need from the network. (Ok, so in most cases, a burned CD would be more useful. Oh well.)