Slashdot Mirror
Linux on a Floppy: Intro to Mini Linux Distros
GonzoJohn writes: "If you've ever been stuck on the freeway with a flat tire and no jack, you know what it's like to have a Linux system crash and not have a boot disk. And although nearly every Linux distribution company asks you make a boot/recovery floppy when you install Linux for the first time, many users skip this important step. Out of the boot/recovery disk concept was born the Mini-Linux distribution." Read this article on Linux Orbit, with a brief intro to some of the mini-distros available.
[lame windows weenie troll starts]
You mean that Linux crashes?
What is next? Blue screen's of death?
[/lame windows weenie troll ends]
The truth of the matter is that in a Windows NT or 2000 server you can boot the box off the install CD and run a repair utility. freeBSD can be installed off two floppies and over the network, and it cannot be that hard to add to the floppy images enough functionality to add a repair program.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Agreed. The days with resuce floppys are behind us. No matter how good they are, you can only fit very little on a floppy and it is a pain to work in a limited shell and not all the commands and utilities you are used to. Superrescue on the other hand gives you more than 1 GB on a compressed file system. If you have a bootable CDROM you really have no excuse for not using superrescue the next time you have problems.
Yeah right.
*MY* development box consists of a floppy with the following:
1) io.sys
2) msdos.sys
3) 4dos.com (renamed command.com)
4) turboc 3.0 (with the IDE)
5) Nasm
6) symdeb
Ofcourse, I have a dedicated mp3 box, another with all sorts of "visual"
development crap, and yet another one running all the Unix desktop rivals out
there.
But I use my DOS box for meditation. Small is beautiful, small is good for
you. I know the exact size of occupied diskspace, and I am proud to say that
I can account for every byte of memory. How often do you do a memory grep to
search for in-core strings? I do that on a daily basis, and it is very reassuring.
Great! I'll just chuck my firewall and fileserver boxen on a landfill and buy some newer hardware then!
Thanks for the info, but some of us like to keep hardware in service until the magic smoke gets out (for environmental as well as cost reasons), and a decent boot floppy is an integral part of that. "Buy new hardware!" is a Microsoft strategy, and that's one of the reasons why I've given up on their upgrade-or-become-unsupported OS's.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
've wondered sometimes if the makers of floppy disks have lowered the quality of the disks over the last 10 years.
Yes, quality has fallen because:
1) Who is going to pay a premium for a good floppy?
2) Data density has increased so each bit has a weaker field and smaller footprint than the old 720 Kb disks - easier to demagnetise or scratch.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I just ordered a new machine last week (still waiting for it), and I decided to start a new trend. No floppy disk drive!!
The last time I actually personally _needed_ to use a floppy disk was installing Debian on a 486 with no cdrom. For older machines, you can' t beat the 3 disk net install. This, however, is 2002. We have cheap burners, media that costs no more, if not less than floppy disks, and BIOS's that boot from CD as a standard feature.
Why has the floppy survived this long? I work at a helpdesk position at my University between classes for extra cash...I've seen firsthand the horrors of the fragility of this ancient storage media. Ever lost your thesis due to lost clusters, bad sectors, etc? (But it worked at home this morning...)
Please: Consider abandoning the floppy!
-Ben
I was a little disappointed by the article; I've tried Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian but my current system is one I built from ground up from source. There's a lot of lip-service paid to the merits of really learning linux and its internals, through things like the Power-up to Bash prompt HOWTO, but I don't see many people actually doing it.
I've only been using linux since December, but I think building my own system has taught me a thing or three that someone who has used, for example Mandrake for a few years wouldn't know.
There's much to be said for learning by doing. I was expecting a little more than a listing of ready-made distros.
People have been predicting that it will take a dumbing down of some sort for linux to become a viable alternative on the desktop. Is this it?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Why should I buy and install an archaic piece of hardware just for disaster recovery? The distributions should supply programs to help me make boot CDROMs.