Damn Small Puppies
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.
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