[Mel Thompson]

Hi, I call myself The Eternal Newbie. I've been messing around with various dstros of Linux for years, just to test their usability for Mac-Minded folks, so I try to not get too sophisticated. I'm always trying to dumb myself down in order to keep in the the really real end-user type.

To this end I download Puppy Linux, and, from SUSE, burned my first ISO image on Linux without too much fuss at all. Can't remember exactly how I used the CD ISO program, but I think a few lucky pokes got me through in two tries. That itself is a victory. And then I proceeded to work for the next several hours to get Puppy onto a flash drive, and, to do it in such a way that, working with BIOS in a very primitive and non-geeky manner, got my old PC to boot from the two-gig pen drive by default.

By the way, Puppy and pen drives have a long way to go, but still, they are to be commended. One problem tends to be that the disk partitioning thing, something I think no one but computer professionals should ever have to think about, is still really rough in Puppy when you get to the flash drive level.

All the documentation on Puppy drive partitioning, when combined from several sources, and when tried in twenty different orders, none of which really work, one eventually finds a sequence that allows successful partitioning of the pen drive from the Puppy installer in such a way that Puppy not only installs on the pen drive, but becomes bootable from it. Installing something on a drive and getting BIOS and the drive to cooperate to produce a boot is very much an occult science to newbies.

The sad thing was, all of the documentarians described some part of the pen drive partitioning process in correct order, but absolutely all of them, which is typical in Linux documentation totally missed the mark in terms of a true step-by-step for newbies kind of way. Intrepid as I am for a permanent newbie, I just clear off a drive and start trying every sequence possible till one works. (Again, the one the finally works is almost never, ever coinicidental with any writer's description, but always ends up being a shamanistic kind of gestalt combination of the various documents.)

Again, this rant aside, Puppy rocks because Puppy proves that the future of computing will be to have NO HARD DRIVES INSIDE the computer, leaving the computer stateless. In the future each computer will have something like USB or FIrewire ports, and, in each user's back pocket will be three pen drives, one for Linux, one for Mac and one for Windows. BIOS will be the only issue left, and even that, one day, might be done away with if the operating systems on the pen drive are in charge. In this way, one's "computer," per se, will never be a problem in terms of drive priorities, drives hostile to each other or OSes competing with each other.

I remain,

THE ETERNAL NEWBIE

[Agent-X]

Yeah, Puppy is awesome and super fast.

However, I think I'd like to bring up the point that there isn't really such a thing as "diskless" in the Linux world. Also, the DVD/CD used for Puppy Linux could be considered like a HDD, because it rotates a disc and writes to it as would a HDD.

And perhaps flash drives are the exception. RAMdisks could also be one, but the word disk is in their name.

I think flash drives are the only thing that can avoid the semantics of "diskless," because no where in their name is the word "disk" or "disc."

I suppose people could consider it a type of disk, though.

[Filipet]

I don't think Windows will ever be made to run from a memory stick. I don't even think Windows will survive until the era of diskless computers. And Apple strictly keeps the MacOS run only on it's hardware, so Apple would have to make it run on every PC. And with Linux you can already do that. We have to wait until there will be memory sticks with large amounts of space until someone considers the idea with Windows/MacOS.

[carlosponti]

I've seen XP on a memory stick that was stripped down to be used for PC diagnosis. dont expect anything less than survival for windows. its naive to believe otherwise. puppy is cool i use it from time to time. there are things i dont like but over all its good. i have found a way to get ubuntu on a 1 gb flash drive. not room for much else but it had a wm. granted you cant just download XP and install it onto a flash drive i believe its a company that buys a licensed copy and works with microsoft to get it installed onto a flash drive.

and i found this Windows In Your Pocket | Tom's Hardware

and this
Langa Letter: XP On Your Thumb Drive -- USB Drives -- InformationWeek


oh yeah and here is one for Mac OS X
Installing Mac OS X on a Flash Drive


ps Google is your friend here...

[Agent-X]

I've seen Windows on a "diskless" computer. It had to do with the iRAM.

[Mel Thompson]

Just kicking back having a nice day with Puppy. I'm a believer in the pre-loaded live-disk. I like the idea of relaxing sometimes and just letting the distro do what it can do as it come preloaded with whatever. So today, just for fun, I lived on Puppy.

Astoundingly, without codec hell, Puppy, one of the tiniest distros, just simply has gxine preloaded and totally codecked out so that, with no effort on my part, I simply surfed over to KCSM, hit the "Listen Live" button, simply guessed at whatever media player seemed closest, in this case Real Player, and gxine automatically comes up and takes the prelist, and blam, without days of programming, I'm listening to jazz while doing my Christmas cards.

Now, I may be on drugs here, but if Puppy Linux can pull this off, well, um, need I say more. Okay, so it turns out that in fact there is no requirement that one makes one's distro incompetent to play ordinary media files. I mean, when I think Puppy took like four minutes to download, and when I think of the monster distros with their multiple DVDs, not CDs even, and the massive gigabytes, but somehow, out of those tens of millions of lines of codes, the arranging of a great open-source player like gxine could not be managed in the mix, well, hmm.

Although I must credit Debian with putting Noatun on there. It handles MP4s like a dream. Now, call me an outer space dreamer, but could anyone manage a distro with gxine and Noatun on it at once, or would that break the code of mandatory suffering?

Well, so this live distro has a Printer Wizard. (A Wizard is a thingy that makes computers work and end users go back to typing their letters. Check into it sometime.) Anyway, so this wizard just simply detects my HP 1012 Laserjet, and figures it all out and hooks it up to my usb ports and mixes it in with CUPS. From the live disk it also has a thingy called a Network Wizard where mandatory suffering regulations are also waived. So it hooks up my printer and my DSL in a total of five minutes, takes my .pls file from the radio station and is cranking jazz. PUPPY!

And another fun thing. (Alright, so the AbiWord pre-install didn't cut it and couldn't find my printer.) Not to despair though, Sea Monkey browser came loaded with it's fun "Composer" program, which of course can't match real word processing. But, just for fun, I accepted it's format limits and did all my snail mail letters from it today. It was fun to just live my day off the Puppy.

Oh yeah, so I go to watch TV, (I'm a lame political junkie), and blam, MSNBC television streaming, (apparently Flash or some equivalent Pre-Loaded). How odd that I'd fiddled for days with some massive distros of world renown to get them only half way to that point. Puppy, you rock!

[bigtomrodney]

The problem with codecs is the law, not Linux. In fact more specifically it is in the largest part USA Law. In Europe there are no patent laws restricting usage of these codecs as they are fairly reverse engineered and used where there is no reasonable alternative. You will find you get the usual media players in all distros but the backends are crippled so they can be distributed in the USA.

One notable example historically has been Mandriva/Mandrake as they are based in France and thus are not subject to American law.

[Agent-X]

Oh, come on now!
I was well within my right to post that!

I've been on the murga forums since early July.

One of the first things people worried about was the lack of security in puppy.
After more people kept preaching that the sky was falling, that's when the increase in rootkits happened toward puppy users.

Bah, onto thee!

I do like how the developer update Puppy for newer kernels, though. However, that hasn't been happening too much as of late.

[Mel Thompson]

Yeah, I think there's a social disconnect, which is only natural, between folks who are linux programmers and those of us who may not even do online banking. Like right now, anyone
who wants to break into my machine is welcome to it. They could steal all the poetry I write
which no one reads and which folks are afraid I will force onto them. Anyone who wants to
steal it . . . go at it. So yeah, Puppy rocks, and frankly, anyone wants to wipe my worthless
hard drive can do it, maybe they'll steal codes to my bad rap lyrics and get rejected by
record companies with them like I did. Yeah, I'm just not that important to need vast security
structures. Frankly, anyone who breaks into my whole house gets what, a sucky used PC
so heavy they could barely carry it. Yo, let them try to sell the piece of junk cd-rom drive
in there. Whoooo.

Hey, I say, let Ubuntu and Fedora and Debian and Slackware just skip the next ten million
lines of security code, and go ahead and assemble the codecs that come on Puppy Linux
wherein lay a fully-assembled version of gxine that, with no work on the end-user's part,
simply plays KCSM automatically. That is, it senses it and turns itself on while I listen.
Somehow no copyright or patent problem there. gxine exists, and can be asembled by
programmers to work this way and can be then put on a pre-loaded OS in such a way
that it's no problem. I know it can be done, because, as we are speaking, I am typing
this letter in the word-processing software pre-loaded, which works on my HP 1012
with only two minutes of configuring, and I'm sending it over an internet connection
they set up with only two minutes worth of configuring, and now I'm whizzing back
and forth between radio stations of my choice with simply no codec screwing around
at all. And, now it's been days, and ruthless hackers have decided that access to my
nearly dead floppy drive with Ernest Tubb photos on it will apparently not get them
the fortune or hacker fame they seek. Again, skip the next hundred million lines of
security updates, and send all those dudes over the the gxine codec assembly lab
to do for all the major distros what Puppy does without even trippin.

I remain,

The Evil Eternal Newbie. I don't get it because I don't want to.

[Roxoff]

Originally Posted by Mel Thompson

...Like right now, anyone
who wants to break into my machine is welcome to it. They could steal all the poetry I write which no one reads and which folks are afraid I will force onto them. Anyone who wants to steal it . . . go at it. ...

Nice attitude; the problem is not that they might nick your poetry or read any letters you wrote to your mother...

What if they broke into your PC and used it to help with a denial of service attack on another internet user.

Or used it to launch a virus on the internet.

Or used your IP address to try and break into the international banking system, a US or European government security agency, or tried to carry out some other kind of fraud.

The problem here would be that fingers of blame would be aimed squarely at you. And you care so little... I'm not sure if I would find if amusing or not if you were to go to prison because illegal activities were traced to your computer.