Friday, August 24, 2007

Linux OS, in your Pocket?


My First Flash Drive was 128 Meg for $35.00.

Today's Fry's AD has a 2 Gig Flash Drive for $22.00 minus a $10.00 mail-in Rebate, making it $12.00.

Since today's modern computers can be told to Boot from a Flash Drive, a pretty sophisticated Linux Distro can be installed on that Flash Drive.

Meaning, Yeah, you CAN take it with you.

Years ago Klaus Knopper invented Knoppix as a rescue disk for problem-booting operating systems, like windows. From that the Live Distro was born. Live Distro CD's could boot a new OS without having to write the data to the hard drive. In the early days of Live Distros on CD, only so much real estate was available and only a limited number of programs could fit on roughly 640 meg of storage.

Then DVD's entered the picture, and even Klaus himself said: "You could put in everything AND the kitchen sink...on a DVD Live Distro."

The main Linux players saw the advantage of putting out a Live Distro DVD of their latest offerings.

You see what worked for AOL Online on CD's worked for Linux Live Distros on DVD.

You could buy a $15.00 magazine fron England called LINUX FORMAT and you get a free DVD.

One such DVD is TRIPLE BOOTING with SimplyMepis 3.4, Gentoo 2006.0 and even OpenSolaris BELENIX, another had FreeBSD 6.0, NETBSD 3.0 and OpenBSD 3.8. (Pictured above)

So what needed a DVD for storage, can now go on a $12.00 Flash Drive.

Yep, you can take your FAV Distro with you, on a Flash Drive.