Month: November 2005

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Taking Linux On The Road With Ubuntu – Linux To Go

Tom’s Hardware has a review of an interesting product, the Ubuntu H2. It’s a 3 GB USB microdrive that comes with a bootable DVD to install Ubuntu onto it, for the purpose of booting Ubuntu off the USB device.

Once Linux is ready to go, you need to make the computer boot from the H2 Micro USB Drive. Usually computers will either boot from a CD/DVD, a floppy disc or the system hard drive. However, as we want to use the Ubuntu H2 as a portable operating system, we need to get the system to boot from USB.

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Kubuntu/Ubuntu LiveCD News

A note here about the Dapper Drake (6.10) Ubuntu/Kubuntu release LiveCDs. Looks like they’re finally going to add an installer onto their LiveCDs. While this already exists on their LiveDVDs, it would be nice for the DVD-less computers. Also it would be nice if the installer ran from inside the Live environment, like it does on Knoppix, MEPIS, PCLinuxOS, or others.

Free CDs for Kubuntu through shipit should be available for the next release if the planned Live CD Installer removes the need for a separate install CD.

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MapFS makes its debut

NewsForge has a writeup on the new MapFS filesystem, and some of its uses. One use looks very similar to UnionFS or Copy-on-Write, which already allow users to modify any files on their LiveCDs.

One possibility Dennis and Stahl mentioned is a set-up that can run off a live CD. According to Stahl, they would like to see users have the ability to change things that run off a CD, and MapFS would make it easier to facilitate such a use. He said that by populating the view so that it refers to all the files on the CD, and setting up a temp directory to be used for the copy and write target, users would be able to modify any of the files on the file system.

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OpenSolaris liveCD boots into Xorg/XFce

LinuxDevices.com has a nice overview of Belenix, an OpenSolaris LiveCD.

The liveCD represents the Belenix project’s first release capable of booting into a graphical environment. The project hopes to follow up eventually with support for hard drive installation.

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Gentoo Linux Newsletter — October 24th, 2005

Oops, missed this from last week, Gentoo released a new version of their LiveCD for SGI machines with support for more SGI hardware, like the SGI Origin fridge-sized computers. I would have tried a joke about nobody using old SGI hardware, except there are two Origins running across the hall of my office, happily (slowly?) performing web and DNS services.

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Fighting FUD With Humor: A review of “Moving To Linux” 2nd edition

Mad Penguin dot org has one of the longest book reviews of a tech book I’ve ever seen. Despite it being long, it is actually an entertaining read (so far, I’m not done yet), and it includes a review of the LiveCD the author of the book created, WFTL.

His distro takes you to a home page with hyperlinks to his very own Linux Users Group, where you can get great support from a community that he has created from scratch. When I first started using Linux as a simple end user in late 2000, my greatest concern was where to go to ask stupid questions in the event that my Linux guru friends were too busy to take yet another tech support call. It certainly would have been nice to have a resource like Marcel’s community available back then.