So, with my new USB memory stick, I decided to throw a bootable minidistribution on it. Doesn’t really help for my Thinkpad, but the other laptops will boot off of it, not to mention it’s just a really freaking handy thing to have.
I started out with Damn Small Linux. Not too shabby, but feels more like a rescue distro than something actually usable. Then I went for DSL-N, which is its “big sister”, and we got a bit closer to the mark. My goal was basically to get Knoppix in under 1G and have some space left over.
Then I found Puppy Linux. It feels the difference between buying generic and name-brand drugs — not much. And it works great. There was a little trickery involved in booting it, though: I used syslinux instead of isolinux, so I did the same stuff you have to do to get DSL to boot off USB — basically, renaming isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg. On top of that, syslinux.cfg has “PMEDIA=idecd”. This needed to be changed to “PMEDIA=usbcd”. After that, everything works flawlessly.
I have three laptops right now. An IBM Thinkpad A50m (”crossbone” (or “bones”), which has never steered me wrong — it was unhappy with its hard drive earlier this morning, so I booted with init=/bin/sh, ran e2fsck with badblocks, rebooted, and it’s been chugging along all day per usual), a Compaq Presario V5000 (”widget”, Marie’s laptop, which has some issues), and a Toshiba Satellite which I’m too lazy to put down my cig and go look at to get a model number off of.
The Satellite isn’t actually mine, I’m just fixing it for a corporal of Marines.
Here’s the deal. (more…)
I just found a new reason to hate Myspace: A big “ARE YOU GAY? Take our quiz to find out!” ad at the bottom. Newsflash: I don’t need an intarweeb quiz to tell me if I’m gay or not. Hell, here you go:
There you go. If you don’t know which one you are, you probably still think girls (or guys?) are ucky.
I know Myspace probably isn’t the only place running the ad, but were it not for Myspace, I never would have seen it.
Anyway.
I bought a 1G USB stick at Fry’s (USD $12.99, when did these things get so F’n cheap?), and I’ve been experimenting with different things to put on it, mostly live distributions. Damn Small Linux and DSL-N are the least painful so far. Eventually, I’d like to reimplement my old system of having the encrypted filesystem on it with all my private keys (SSH, GPG, etcetera)…
(more…)
