I recall reading on www.highliftsystems.com (offline at least right now) that they would have to move the ribbon every 12 hours or so to avoid orbiting debris, but that this was doable and the debris is already tracked.
The HighLift plan was to put the base station on the equator way out in the Pacific Ocean. They made a good case that it would be incredibly difficult to sabotage the ribbon stealthily. Also the ribbon would be a very difficult target to hit intentionally. Also the first order of business upon deploying an elevator ribbon is to use it to manufacture other ribbons right alongside the existing one (much much easier than manufacturing in one place then deploying it), so a hostile entity would probably have a 6 month to a year window of opportunity to catasrophically damage the project.
IIRC they also had plans for maintenance climbers (machines, not people) that would regularly traverse and patch the ribbon in places damaged by untrackable debris and small meteors or whatever might hit it.
I'm far from an expert on this, but from what I've read:
Your plan still involves adding tons of mass to the vehicle; it has to lift the entire mass during the portion where gravity is the largest factor. With the elevator the energy is used to turn motors to roll up the ribbon, and there's no propellant mass.
With your plan, remember that self-propelled launch vehicles are launched orbitally, not vertically. Your energy laser would track a moving tarket, and there would have to be mutliple energy stations for each time the vehicle disappears below the ground station's horizon. With the elevator, there will be some additional tricks in getting it deployed in a vertical manner, but once it's in place gravity and centripetal accelleration will keep it vertical with respect to the ground station, so the energy laser station will never lose line-of-sight with the vehicle as long as it's on the ribbon. I don't know if it's possible to launch a self-propelled vehicle geosynchronously vertically into space, but I suspect it would take a lot more energy--and in your case mass--than an orbital ascent.
Also, the elevator allows for controlled descent to Earth with no propellant mass needed. No heat shields or drag devices either, but I suspect these would be standard emergency equipment on manned craft.
OK Eric I think you're getting a bit carried away here.
I don't think he is. He's making his point better than most. If I read him right he's saying you can't make an effective craft that is both buoyant and will glide well. His follow-up post makes it clearer that a plane-shaped body can't hold the volume of lighter-than-airness to float the body in air.
The air turbines in the article are what really got me superskeptical. With gliding, drag is a huge problem esepecially aiming for a 40:1 ratio. Weight is another huge problem.
But let's even drop the recharge turbine and unlimited range ideas for a moment: the article is proposing a vehicle light enough to float up, strong enough to support a glider's wingspan and many human passangers and capable of reducing buoyancy enough and having the aerodynamics to achieve a 40:1 glide. That would be amazing to achieve.
What would be even more amazing if it could go where it wanted to and not be at the mercy of the wind like a hot air balloon. Think about it: a leaf is heavier than air but flutters about at the slightest gust of wind. This plane will be more controllable, but I can't see it changing its density so drastically that it can make reasonable headway into a wind; sure it may glide, but you have a positive airspeed with a negative groundspeed even in a powered plane.
Frankly I'm not sure this idea would be plausible if we had weightless superstrong material to make the body structure.
One last thought: How long would it take to rise 10 miles in one of these things?
Please be advised that we are raising the Asteroid alert to code orange--high from yellow--elevated. This is due to intelligence that there may be big rocks nearby planning on heading in our general direction. Please be on the alert and double-check your umbrellas.
If you want a comparable situation, why don't you find a nice shiny Porsche parked along side the street. Build an exact replica of this car, and drive off in the replica.
.unless they have a patent for it...
Actually, as I understand it, you can do that even if it's patented, but you can't sell it to someone else without running afoul of civil law.
Do most/all readers also write? Or is there a special writer device?
I bought a card reader for a buck or two several years ago at First Saturday. It has a 9-pin serial connector, but I never got around to playing with it. I'm pretty sure it's still in my pile of old cables and things, though.
Actually, having a backup card to use sounds kinda cool, especially since it wouldn't have my account info embossed on it. Time to Google for card reader device & driver info...
Okay, I guess I could post a real post instead of attempted funny one-liners.
Firebird is SQL, not relational.
Actually, the title of the Slashdot article and the linked Firebird project page both proclaim that it is relational.
And I could be wrong, but I thought SQL is specifically for relational databases. I suppose you could use a simple SELECT statement on a standalone table, but I would think most SQL breaks without a relational database underneath.
I agree with your rebuttal of the grandparent post, though. What's wrong with another open source project? Especially one with dedicated people? I don't know if Firebird is useful to me as a database, but it doesn't take long for me to infer that there is a dedicated development team and community behind it, and I'm not about to go trying to convince them to support PostgreSQL MySQL or any other project.
And I can't understand why anyone would hold the naming issue against them. Maybe it was just a successful troll. Does the grandparent poster refuse to use Phoenix products, too?
Check out the German article first, then its translation on Groklaw and maybe also same translation posted in the English section of the Heise website (in order of appearance).
I'm supposed to RTFA 3 times?
1: You're lucky if one out of every 3 read it once.
2: Is this supposed to be a cascading Slashdotting? Next time just submit the story 3 times with a different link each time.
No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go
No, but listen to what those cops stop people for. Many times it's for driving through a certain area of town.
Last night an episode of Cops caught my attention: A Texas officer (don't recall which department) said he was going to pull over this guy going 63 in a 55 zone. He gave a small speech about people speeding and foreshadows that suspects tell goofy stories. I was immediately suspicious that he left something out, because going 63 in a 55 in Texas is pretty ubiquitous,and I've flown past cruisers in the ditches at 8mph over the limit many times and didn't get pulled over. It was two latinos, and their stories didn't match, and a begrudgingly consented search of the car turned up tens of pounds of weed. On one hand I'm glad they caught some bad guys, but on the other hand did he pull them over because they were latino? Or perhaps he had another tip or cue that he was working off of but didn't tell the camera crew.
Another thing about Cops (the show): I notice that the officer with the camera is rarely the first on the scene unless it's a preplanned bust. Perhaps this is just happenstance and reality (lots of cops in a city and few camera-worthy calls), but I suspect the cop is there to babysit and censor the camera crew; I suspect a higher-ranking officer is sitting at the station deciding to which calls to send the cop with the camera crew and which to avoid. Then again, this is probably smart since the camera crew are civilians that distract the cop and need protection in a weapons incident.
Re:I'm going to go out on a limb here....
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
Aha! I found my disk. Remember Grub needes the netboot driver compiled in. And Knoppix's terminal server may or may not need the leading/tftpboot in the pathnames. I have only altered the real IP address for security. Note that kernel and miniroot "-current"'s are symlinked on the tftp server to the current (Knoppix 3.3) kernel and miniroot. Here's the menu.lst I actually use:
I work for a larger company and our IS Security team advised me that using Knoppix or PE Disk to access the network was a no-no.
Heheheheh. I also work for a larger company and understand the mentality; luckily I'm not aware of an anti-LiveCD policy, but that's probably because they don't know they exist.
Funny that they're scared of LiveCDs but allow everyone else to run Windows, IE and Outlook* with Administrator privileges.
<sarcastic rant>
"What? Software that doesn't work right? Try making them admins and see if that fixes it. It did? Oh good."
My IS group apparently decided to disable certain ICMP transmission over routers. I haven't been able to ping accross subnets for several months now. Now that's security!
I do pretty much the same thing with Knoppix, but I usually transfer over the network with either Samba, scp or ftp depending on the situation. Or I'll throw in a backup hard drive on the secondary IDE.
I'm going to check out Bart's for defragging NTFS, though. My current plan--not yet tested--is to boot into Win2k/xp recovery console, copy all files w/acls to another disk, format the original reserving about 4x the default MFT size and copy everything back. I'll see if Bart's will be better or faster than the recovery console.
I have a multiuser Win2k PC with an MFT in 867 fragments!! Man that thing is slow. I downloaded a trial copy of Diskeeper and even it can't defrag this MFT. I could probably just reimage it, but I'm looking for a longer term solution because this is a periodic problem. And I don't want to license a defragmenter for every damn PC; what happened to the old days when you could buy a defrag utility disk and use it on one PC at a time? (Furthermore, why can't a multiuser OS keep from fragmenting itself into oblivion?)
I forgot to mention that I rename my KNOPPIX vmlinuz and miniroot.gz with version numbers and symlink them to vmlinuz-current and miniroot-current.gz. Adjust as necessary for you.
Here are those two lines again, this time with the pathnames highlighted. Like I say, you may need to adjust the filename, and depending on how KNOPPIX's tftpserver is set up you may need to add /tftpboot to the beginning of the pathnames:
kernel/vmlinuz-current nfsdir=10.0.0.5:/knoppix nodhcp lang=us ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init apm=power-off nomce hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi vga=791 quiet noprompt noeject
initrd/miniroot-current.gz
(I was going to post my menu.lst, but I can't find my disk! I'll post a reply to this with my menu.lst when I find my disk.)
Well, I can't find the stupid disk. Okay, I'll reconstruct it as best as I can--without testing--from memory, documentation and peeking at KNOPPIX's startup settings:
That nodhcp in the kernel parameters doesn't look right; I cut and pasted that from KNOPPIX's pxelinux.cfg/default file, so you may need to axe that for Grub, but try it this way first. Also, I think noprompt and noeject are parameters I threw in there to try to avoid the CD eject prompt, but those cheat codes don't seem to work for the KNOPPIX netboot init script. (They do for a local boot.) The rest of the parameters were scoped either from KNOPPIX's/tftboot/pxelinux.cfg/default or the syslinux.cfg file in the boot.img. Note that I had to remove initrd=miniroot.gz and BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix when copied from the syslinux version of the kernel parameters since Grub loads the initrd directly and BOOT_IMAGE is some syslinux thing I think. (Come to think of it, I wonder if this is used by the init script? well, it worked without it for me.)
I don't recall how KNOPPIX's tftp server is set up; you may need to add a/tftpboot to the beginning of the paths for the kernel and initrd.
The magic is in the dhcp, ifconfig and root (nd) lines. See the network section of the Grub manual for details, but basically dhcp grabs an IP and (nd) is network device. Since I didn't put the tftp server location in my DHCP server config I had to add the line ifconfig --server=10.0.0.5 to specify it.
nfsdir= is used by the KNOPPIX init script to find the/path-is-usually-cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX image.
To do this, first download the source. Grub uses etherboot's drivers (included with Grub source), and it seems like I had better luck with either of Grub 0.93 or 0.92, but I may be getting confused with another project I did so both may be good. 0.94 is new since I last looked. unpack it and look at/path-to/grub-0.9x/netboot/README.netboot for which drivers you want. Example:./configure --enable-3c90x . After compiling, format a floppy with either a fat, minix or ext2 filesystem, make a directory of either/grub/ or/boot/grub/ , copy stage1 and stage2 to the grub directory and make your menu.lst there. Then, assuming your floppy is fd0, run grub (or boot a grub boot disk) and enter the following manual commands:
root (fd0) setup (fd0)
Grub should find stage1, stage2 and menu.lst and install stage1 in the boot sector.
Come to think of it, etherboot may be able to specify a tftp server during compile time, and it definitely can be written to a floppy disk. However I like Grub for its versatility. And Grub can be compiled for support for multiple network cards; I'm not sure if an etherboot *.lzdsk can do that. I can also modify all Grub parameters at runtime, and I'm farily sure I can't do that with etherboot. (/me checks rom-o-matic.net) Doesn't look like etherboot can hardcode a tftpserver or even specify an IP address if necessary. Grub can at runtime.
Free porn. At first it was CShow on CGA. Now it's DivX amateur video from your favorite famous people. (I actually found a GIF viewer for my Apple//e once, but it took several minutes to decode the GIF into that 280x160 "6-color" HGR! Even CGA looked better.)
Oh, games got a little cooler, too. Texturemapped Tetris rocks!
Clippy, the Sound Blaster talking parrot, antialiased fonts and all that crap are for losers. You're right, Appleworks word processer and spreadsheet did the job just fine.
Oh, and when you use KNOPPIX, use "knoppix 2". That's more like the Apple. Just alias catalog 'ls', alias run '.' and alias brun '.'.
Debian is designed to be multi-architecture, but KNOPPIX is targeted only at i386 as far as I know.
Basically, KNOPPIX is a slightly preconfigured Debian system that is cp -a'ed into a cloop filesystem and then a custom init script sets it all up during boot. I think cloop was created for KNOPPIX and not used anywhere else, and I don't know if it's ported or portable to other architectures. There is no make-able source tree for KNOPPIX; the source packages for the various init/setup scripts are available from knopper.net, but it appears you are expected to get the Debian source packages from Debian. (I was just reading a discussion on this; I think it's GPL-okay and a reasonable way to do it for this project. Besides Klaus said the complainer could send him 4 CDRs and a self-addressed envelope if he really wanted the sources from him.)
Anyway, back to the point: I'm not sure how portable the setup scripts or device autodetection (via Kudzu) are to other architectures.
I've been reading up about some of this stuff lately because I'm considering building some custom LiveCD's and was thinking forward to being multi-architecture friendly and also trying to decide whether to base my CDs on KNOPPIX or go a different direction. I definitely want a Debian base, though. Tomorrow I'll probably start looking at the various scripts I linked to earlier and also compare cloop to cramfs and any other compressed filesystems I can find. (At first glance, cloop appears to be a compressed ISO9660 filesystem; I'm wondering why?) I'll probably also build a LiveCD from a minimal Debian instal KNOPPIX-style just to prove to myself that I understand it.
A much more sensible aproach is to do network booting.
If you have control of the DHCP server, sure. (Or if your area uses static IPs and a KNOPPIX DHCP server won't hurt)
The LiveCD has the advantage that most people in a work environment have the ability to boot their PC from CD. And few people who would care that you're doing that can notice that you're doing it.
I'm in a position--local netadmin of a building in a corporatewide/worldwide network--where I have moderate control over the network and DHCP server but not absolute or sole control. It's a Novell DHCP server, and I haven't figured out how to make it provide netboot parameters only to clients identifying themselves as etherboot devices, and I don't want to give Linux termserver boot info out to everything because many of my non-PC network devices may try to download new embedded kernels off the tftp server.
Also, nonconformance gives the corporate admins something to point to if something goes wrong; it goes like this: "Well, your system is configured differently than ours, so that's your problem" even if the issue is demonstratably their problem, and even if it has nothing to do with DHCP.
I've implemented a hybrid solution where I use GNU Grub's network capabilities (you have to compile with specific network code./configured in) and have a Grub floppy that will grap an IP from DHCP and grab the kernel and initrd as configured in/path/to/grub/menu.lst and use CDs for PCs where that doesn't work.
When I read the grandparent post for some reason it made a couple of ideas fuse in my head: I had previously tried to implement a minimal Linux install that would boot up to a tn3270 client; I had a proof of concept prototype ready when my V.P. pooh-poohed the idea--nevermind that everyone else thought it was a great idea that would save $1mil over their current plan. A different idea was to have a custom LiveCD with items and preconfigurations useful to my company. Duh, why didn't I think of it before: a LiveCD that is only a tn3270 client!! Now my department can stealthily save $1mil! (Not that I'll see a penny of it, but hey, maybe I get corporate karma, and it definitely goes on my resume.)
(I was going to post my menu.lst, but I can't find my disk! I'll post a reply to this with my menu.lst when I find my disk.)
Slashdot Mirror
I recall reading on www.highliftsystems.com (offline at least right now) that they would have to move the ribbon every 12 hours or so to avoid orbiting debris, but that this was doable and the debris is already tracked.
The HighLift plan was to put the base station on the equator way out in the Pacific Ocean. They made a good case that it would be incredibly difficult to sabotage the ribbon stealthily. Also the ribbon would be a very difficult target to hit intentionally. Also the first order of business upon deploying an elevator ribbon is to use it to manufacture other ribbons right alongside the existing one (much much easier than manufacturing in one place then deploying it), so a hostile entity would probably have a 6 month to a year window of opportunity to catasrophically damage the project.
IIRC they also had plans for maintenance climbers (machines, not people) that would regularly traverse and patch the ribbon in places damaged by untrackable debris and small meteors or whatever might hit it.
I'm far from an expert on this, but from what I've read:
Your plan still involves adding tons of mass to the vehicle; it has to lift the entire mass during the portion where gravity is the largest factor. With the elevator the energy is used to turn motors to roll up the ribbon, and there's no propellant mass.
With your plan, remember that self-propelled launch vehicles are launched orbitally, not vertically. Your energy laser would track a moving tarket, and there would have to be mutliple energy stations for each time the vehicle disappears below the ground station's horizon. With the elevator, there will be some additional tricks in getting it deployed in a vertical manner, but once it's in place gravity and centripetal accelleration will keep it vertical with respect to the ground station, so the energy laser station will never lose line-of-sight with the vehicle as long as it's on the ribbon. I don't know if it's possible to launch a self-propelled vehicle geosynchronously vertically into space, but I suspect it would take a lot more energy--and in your case mass--than an orbital ascent.
Also, the elevator allows for controlled descent to Earth with no propellant mass needed. No heat shields or drag devices either, but I suspect these would be standard emergency equipment on manned craft.
the weak will inherit the Earth
Doesn't matter. We'll just beat them up and take it back.
OK Eric I think you're getting a bit carried away here.
I don't think he is. He's making his point better than most. If I read him right he's saying you can't make an effective craft that is both buoyant and will glide well. His follow-up post makes it clearer that a plane-shaped body can't hold the volume of lighter-than-airness to float the body in air.
The air turbines in the article are what really got me superskeptical. With gliding, drag is a huge problem esepecially aiming for a 40:1 ratio. Weight is another huge problem.
But let's even drop the recharge turbine and unlimited range ideas for a moment: the article is proposing a vehicle light enough to float up, strong enough to support a glider's wingspan and many human passangers and capable of reducing buoyancy enough and having the aerodynamics to achieve a 40:1 glide. That would be amazing to achieve.
What would be even more amazing if it could go where it wanted to and not be at the mercy of the wind like a hot air balloon. Think about it: a leaf is heavier than air but flutters about at the slightest gust of wind. This plane will be more controllable, but I can't see it changing its density so drastically that it can make reasonable headway into a wind; sure it may glide, but you have a positive airspeed with a negative groundspeed even in a powered plane.
Frankly I'm not sure this idea would be plausible if we had weightless superstrong material to make the body structure.
One last thought: How long would it take to rise 10 miles in one of these things?
Alternatively, I have to wonder how much of the functionality of NeWS already exists in Ghostscript.
I'm not familiar with NeWS, but there was an effort to make Display Ghostscript. But it doesn't seem to have been touched in almost 4 years.
Are you kidding? You know it must already exist.
(I love these tools for batch conversions/resizings/thumbnails!)
After paying him, they didn't have enough DVDs to make rent.
buy one and install it on a thousand machines. Fully legal, according to the EULA. Try that with Windows and see what happens...
Um, I did do that with Windows. Is that wrong? And what's this yoola thing you mention?
<sound of BSA crashing through the door>
Please be advised that we are raising the Asteroid alert to code orange--high from yellow--elevated. This is due to intelligence that there may be big rocks nearby planning on heading in our general direction. Please be on the alert and double-check your umbrellas.
IANAL. YMMV.
Do most/all readers also write? Or is there a special writer device?
I bought a card reader for a buck or two several years ago at First Saturday. It has a 9-pin serial connector, but I never got around to playing with it. I'm pretty sure it's still in my pile of old cables and things, though.
Actually, having a backup card to use sounds kinda cool, especially since it wouldn't have my account info embossed on it. Time to Google for card reader device & driver info...
Okay, I guess I could post a real post instead of attempted funny one-liners.
Firebird is SQL, not relational.
Actually, the title of the Slashdot article and the linked Firebird project page both proclaim that it is relational.
And I could be wrong, but I thought SQL is specifically for relational databases. I suppose you could use a simple SELECT statement on a standalone table, but I would think most SQL breaks without a relational database underneath.
I agree with your rebuttal of the grandparent post, though. What's wrong with another open source project? Especially one with dedicated people? I don't know if Firebird is useful to me as a database, but it doesn't take long for me to infer that there is a dedicated development team and community behind it, and I'm not about to go trying to convince them to support PostgreSQL MySQL or any other project.
And I can't understand why anyone would hold the naming issue against them. Maybe it was just a successful troll. Does the grandparent poster refuse to use Phoenix products, too?
Firebird is SQL, not relational.
Yip yip yip! Ow! I sprained by brain!
I'm supposed to RTFA 3 times?
1: You're lucky if one out of every 3 read it once.
2: Is this supposed to be a cascading Slashdotting? Next time just submit the story 3 times with a different link each time.
No one sees the COPS footage were the innocent person was abused, found to be innocent, and then let go
No, but listen to what those cops stop people for. Many times it's for driving through a certain area of town.
Last night an episode of Cops caught my attention: A Texas officer (don't recall which department) said he was going to pull over this guy going 63 in a 55 zone. He gave a small speech about people speeding and foreshadows that suspects tell goofy stories. I was immediately suspicious that he left something out, because going 63 in a 55 in Texas is pretty ubiquitous,and I've flown past cruisers in the ditches at 8mph over the limit many times and didn't get pulled over. It was two latinos, and their stories didn't match, and a begrudgingly consented search of the car turned up tens of pounds of weed. On one hand I'm glad they caught some bad guys, but on the other hand did he pull them over because they were latino? Or perhaps he had another tip or cue that he was working off of but didn't tell the camera crew.
Another thing about Cops (the show): I notice that the officer with the camera is rarely the first on the scene unless it's a preplanned bust. Perhaps this is just happenstance and reality (lots of cops in a city and few camera-worthy calls), but I suspect the cop is there to babysit and censor the camera crew; I suspect a higher-ranking officer is sitting at the station deciding to which calls to send the cop with the camera crew and which to avoid. Then again, this is probably smart since the camera crew are civilians that distract the cop and need protection in a weapons incident.
Yes, but are there any Cave Marlaphants?
I work for a larger company and our IS Security team advised me that using Knoppix or PE Disk to access the network was a no-no.
Heheheheh. I also work for a larger company and understand the mentality; luckily I'm not aware of an anti-LiveCD policy, but that's probably because they don't know they exist.
Funny that they're scared of LiveCDs but allow everyone else to run Windows, IE and Outlook* with Administrator privileges.
<sarcastic rant>
"What? Software that doesn't work right? Try making them admins and see if that fixes it. It did? Oh good."
My IS group apparently decided to disable certain ICMP transmission over routers. I haven't been able to ping accross subnets for several months now. Now that's security!
</sarcastic rant>
I do pretty much the same thing with Knoppix, but I usually transfer over the network with either Samba, scp or ftp depending on the situation. Or I'll throw in a backup hard drive on the secondary IDE.
I'm going to check out Bart's for defragging NTFS, though. My current plan--not yet tested--is to boot into Win2k/xp recovery console, copy all files w/acls to another disk, format the original reserving about 4x the default MFT size and copy everything back. I'll see if Bart's will be better or faster than the recovery console.
I have a multiuser Win2k PC with an MFT in 867 fragments!! Man that thing is slow. I downloaded a trial copy of Diskeeper and even it can't defrag this MFT. I could probably just reimage it, but I'm looking for a longer term solution because this is a periodic problem. And I don't want to license a defragmenter for every damn PC; what happened to the old days when you could buy a defrag utility disk and use it on one PC at a time? (Furthermore, why can't a multiuser OS keep from fragmenting itself into oblivion?)
I forgot to mention that I rename my KNOPPIX vmlinuz and miniroot.gz with version numbers and symlink them to vmlinuz-current and miniroot-current.gz. Adjust as necessary for you.
/tftpboot to the beginning of the pathnames:
/vmlinuz-current nfsdir=10.0.0.5:/knoppix nodhcp lang=us ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init apm=power-off nomce hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi vga=791 quiet noprompt noeject /miniroot-current.gz
Here are those two lines again, this time with the pathnames highlighted. Like I say, you may need to adjust the filename, and depending on how KNOPPIX's tftpserver is set up you may need to add
kernel
initrd
Well, I can't find the stupid disk. Okay, I'll reconstruct it as best as I can--without testing--from memory, documentation and peeking at KNOPPIX's startup settings:
My menu.lst looked something like this:
/tftboot/pxelinux.cfg/default or the syslinux.cfg file in the boot.img. Note that I had to remove initrd=miniroot.gz and BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix when copied from the syslinux version of the kernel parameters since Grub loads the initrd directly and BOOT_IMAGE is some syslinux thing I think. (Come to think of it, I wonder if this is used by the init script? well, it worked without it for me.)
/tftpboot to the beginning of the paths for the kernel and initrd.
/path-is-usually-cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX image.
/path-to/grub-0.9x/netboot/README.netboot for which drivers you want. Example: ./configure --enable-3c90x . After compiling, format a floppy with either a fat, minix or ext2 filesystem, make a directory of either /grub/ or /boot/grub/ , copy stage1 and stage2 to the grub directory and make your menu.lst there. Then, assuming your floppy is fd0, run grub (or boot a grub boot disk) and enter the following manual commands:
Grub should find stage1, stage2 and menu.lst and install stage1 in the boot sector.That nodhcp in the kernel parameters doesn't look right; I cut and pasted that from KNOPPIX's pxelinux.cfg/default file, so you may need to axe that for Grub, but try it this way first. Also, I think noprompt and noeject are parameters I threw in there to try to avoid the CD eject prompt, but those cheat codes don't seem to work for the KNOPPIX netboot init script. (They do for a local boot.) The rest of the parameters were scoped either from KNOPPIX's
I don't recall how KNOPPIX's tftp server is set up; you may need to add a
The magic is in the dhcp, ifconfig and root (nd) lines. See the network section of the Grub manual for details, but basically dhcp grabs an IP and (nd) is network device. Since I didn't put the tftp server location in my DHCP server config I had to add the line ifconfig --server=10.0.0.5 to specify it.
nfsdir= is used by the KNOPPIX init script to find the
To do this, first download the source. Grub uses etherboot's drivers (included with Grub source), and it seems like I had better luck with either of Grub 0.93 or 0.92, but I may be getting confused with another project I did so both may be good. 0.94 is new since I last looked. unpack it and look at
Come to think of it, etherboot may be able to specify a tftp server during compile time, and it definitely can be written to a floppy disk. However I like Grub for its versatility. And Grub can be compiled for support for multiple network cards; I'm not sure if an etherboot *.lzdsk can do that. I can also modify all Grub parameters at runtime, and I'm farily sure I can't do that with etherboot. (/me checks rom-o-matic.net) Doesn't look like etherboot can hardcode a tftpserver or even specify an IP address if necessary. Grub can at runtime.
So where is the advance in technology?
//e once, but it took several minutes to decode the GIF into that 280x160 "6-color" HGR! Even CGA looked better.)
Free porn. At first it was CShow on CGA. Now it's DivX amateur video from your favorite famous people. (I actually found a GIF viewer for my Apple
Oh, games got a little cooler, too. Texturemapped Tetris rocks!
Clippy, the Sound Blaster talking parrot, antialiased fonts and all that crap are for losers. You're right, Appleworks word processer and spreadsheet did the job just fine.
Oh, and when you use KNOPPIX, use "knoppix 2". That's more like the Apple. Just alias catalog 'ls', alias run '.' and alias brun '.'.
Debian is designed to be multi-architecture, but KNOPPIX is targeted only at i386 as far as I know.
Basically, KNOPPIX is a slightly preconfigured Debian system that is cp -a'ed into a cloop filesystem and then a custom init script sets it all up during boot. I think cloop was created for KNOPPIX and not used anywhere else, and I don't know if it's ported or portable to other architectures. There is no make-able source tree for KNOPPIX; the source packages for the various init/setup scripts are available from knopper.net, but it appears you are expected to get the Debian source packages from Debian. (I was just reading a discussion on this; I think it's GPL-okay and a reasonable way to do it for this project. Besides Klaus said the complainer could send him 4 CDRs and a self-addressed envelope if he really wanted the sources from him.)
Anyway, back to the point: I'm not sure how portable the setup scripts or device autodetection (via Kudzu) are to other architectures.
I've been reading up about some of this stuff lately because I'm considering building some custom LiveCD's and was thinking forward to being multi-architecture friendly and also trying to decide whether to base my CDs on KNOPPIX or go a different direction. I definitely want a Debian base, though. Tomorrow I'll probably start looking at the various scripts I linked to earlier and also compare cloop to cramfs and any other compressed filesystems I can find. (At first glance, cloop appears to be a compressed ISO9660 filesystem; I'm wondering why?) I'll probably also build a LiveCD from a minimal Debian instal KNOPPIX-style just to prove to myself that I understand it.
A much more sensible aproach is to do network booting.
./configured in) and have a Grub floppy that will grap an IP from DHCP and grab the kernel and initrd as configured in /path/to/grub/menu.lst and use CDs for PCs where that doesn't work.
If you have control of the DHCP server, sure. (Or if your area uses static IPs and a KNOPPIX DHCP server won't hurt)
The LiveCD has the advantage that most people in a work environment have the ability to boot their PC from CD. And few people who would care that you're doing that can notice that you're doing it.
I'm in a position--local netadmin of a building in a corporatewide/worldwide network--where I have moderate control over the network and DHCP server but not absolute or sole control. It's a Novell DHCP server, and I haven't figured out how to make it provide netboot parameters only to clients identifying themselves as etherboot devices, and I don't want to give Linux termserver boot info out to everything because many of my non-PC network devices may try to download new embedded kernels off the tftp server.
Also, nonconformance gives the corporate admins something to point to if something goes wrong; it goes like this: "Well, your system is configured differently than ours, so that's your problem" even if the issue is demonstratably their problem, and even if it has nothing to do with DHCP.
I've implemented a hybrid solution where I use GNU Grub's network capabilities (you have to compile with specific network code
When I read the grandparent post for some reason it made a couple of ideas fuse in my head: I had previously tried to implement a minimal Linux install that would boot up to a tn3270 client; I had a proof of concept prototype ready when my V.P. pooh-poohed the idea--nevermind that everyone else thought it was a great idea that would save $1mil over their current plan. A different idea was to have a custom LiveCD with items and preconfigurations useful to my company. Duh, why didn't I think of it before: a LiveCD that is only a tn3270 client!! Now my department can stealthily save $1mil! (Not that I'll see a penny of it, but hey, maybe I get corporate karma, and it definitely goes on my resume.)
(I was going to post my menu.lst, but I can't find my disk! I'll post a reply to this with my menu.lst when I find my disk.)
So...ogres are like KNOPPIX?