USB Boot

Knoppix

Knoppix 6 has lost it's direction I think. Knoppix was a go to OS for figuring out what was wrong with a box and getting information off it. It performed no miracles. It was just handy. Lots of utilities and was built for purpose.

Then came Adrian.  Adrian is fine if you are blind and need to get around a computer. It reads the OS to you as you navigate menu trees to get around and get things done. It is a pain to get through this interface to the meat of Knoppix to get something done. Once you get to the full Knoppix install, you realize most of the utilities and cool stuff about Knoppix has disappeared to make room for Adrian.

Knoppix does have a cut down version without Adrian for people who need the OS to come up and get to a box without the stupid front end. It sounds like people complained and the developers made the change as an after thought. I've used it. It seems to work fine.

When you install the Knoppix 6 ISO on to a USB drive it detects this and gives you an option to make a save partition where you can put your own documents or what have you. Very nice. It looks like saving writes as soon as you hit save. Perhaps a sync is required for a full write. This is important because you will loose data if you have clicked save and your data sits in a cache somewhere without a true write to the drive.

Puppy

I found Puppy Linux. It is what Knoppix was supposed to  be. Puppy seems to make their Linux so you can take it and use it like a wrapper around your software. I installed Puppy on a 128MB USB key drive and still had 22MB left for my crap. If I use it, I'll use a larger drive. I just had that one lying around for the test.

Puppy doesn't have a bunch of utilities, but that is not the point. I have not had an opportunity to boot it on many boxes, so I do not know if the drivers available work across a spectrum of machines or not. It looks like nothing is really saved until you shut down or reboot the system. This is disastrous. This kind of thing might blow the whole deal.

The cute fluffy little logos are more annoying than the penguin that I've never really liked. I'm going to open a restaurant in international waters that only serves cuddle fare.

Problems

Knoppix has issues running on crappy machines. It also has problems with old hardware. Knoppix has become a bit bloated for what I need and yet removed many utilities I consider important.

Puppy is very small, runs fast, but is incomplete by miles. That isn't their target. I do not know yet if I' will be able to get utilities to run properly under that limited OS. It is small, which is cool and a drag at the same time. I like the clock gadget that comes up by default.

Use

Mainly I need something that will let me bring up a system on a healthy OS. 99% of thins that go wrong with computers is software. People have messed with their settings until it broke and then they call me. These Boot devices let me make changes to configuration files and back up data before blowing up the box.

I also need Ghost or other utility for imaging hard drives. Even this has become all but moot because of PXE booting. That is where you boot from an image file on a server and not even go through the trouble of installing it on the local box. Pretty cool stuff. The day is on it's way when you don't have an OS on your local system. There will just be a simple menu that lets you boot the box in to your software. No more conflicts, but it makes cut and paste a bit more complex. I suppose that is where virtual machines come in.