Comments on: ‘Puppy’ Linux is amazing

By: Ainz

Ainz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:41:58 +0000

When I was a little kid, we would vacation in Florida every year. Staring out the back window for 700 miles, I’d drink in the scenery until I reached overload, then retreat back inside. Though too many miles have streamed by, I still press my nose to the glass from time to time.

The interplay of what is possible, and immediately available, floors me.

By: Ainz

Ainz — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:34:55 +0000

Thinking about what you said, and realized (as I understand it) Linux is essentially UNIX recompiled to run on PC’s.

Stone knives and bear skins…

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:22:58 +0000

What’s amazing is precisely the fact that you can plug a USB stick or CDROM or even a floppy (if you encounter a computer still equipped with one) and boot a computer using your own operating system instead of the one installed on it. It’s a very valuable trick, not least in Ainz’s situation in which he needed to recover data from a dead computer.

It’s not really unprecedented, though. Many flavors of Linux are available in the form of a bootable DVD, or a USB flash drive. Puppy has to win the award for smallest Linux, I’d say. Also, the trick’s been done to Windows, with a utility (forget the name, dammit) that extracts its DOS underbelly to create a disk that will boot to the DOS command line. Which, again, sounds primitive, but it’s a lifesaver when you need to get inside a busted machine.

Or you need to break into a computer. It hardly matters if you protect Windows with a password, when somebody can come along and just bypass Windows. Linux can read a Windows hard drive just fine, thank you. When you log into your Linux as “root”, you become the Windows administrator too, with all the rights, privileges, and power appertaining thereto.

By: TB

TB — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:39:23 +0000

Heh.

Back to popping a boot disk into the slot to start our machines again. I think I still have an MS-DOS floppy around here somewhere.