Recently Cathy’s ‘99 Dell Latitude Cpi D300XT died. The screen had been flaky ever since she bought it (off E-Bay with the remnants of a 3 year warranty) and we had the screen replaced under that warranty once, thought the problem returned leading me to wonder if the real problem might have been a cable connection or worse. The machine was running Windows XP when whatever it was that happened happened and it would only cycle through the boot process over and over, never settling down to present me with anything useful to work with. During the annoying boot-that-wasnt sequence, the XP logo would flash and give preliminary indication that everything was just fine, but the hard drive would be making a strange multi-toned grinding noise that seemed to repeat again and again in an endless 3/4 waltz-like vamp which pointed to something more sinister. Cathy had bookmarks and some text files on the machine that were important to her, so I pledged to attempt to recover them somehow. Of course the first thing everyone would try was the Windows disk to attempt some kind of reinstallation, but having suffered through Windows installs (and reinstalls) many times at work, I was not up for wasting an hour watching a status bar. I remembered that I had once had a linux distro that could boot from a floppy and I went and found tomsrtbt in my desk drawer. I got the machine to boot (to linux) in about 2 minutes which had the reinstall option beat hands down. A few commands later (mount and tar) I had the files she wanted off the sad laptop and onto the happy desktop.

Thinking the hard drive was dead, I removed it leaving the laptop mostly useless unless I wanted to boot the handy linux disk I had just used so successfully every time. Doing so would get the machine functional, but only in console mode (what DOS people call the “command line”) without a GUI or hope for any images. The linux on a floopy idea had proven its value, but for daily use the laptop was a PII300MHz, I was sure I could do better than that. I thought that if the floppy could pack an entire linux distro, imagine how much would fit on a CD, and most machines can boot from a CD too, the laptop could I knew.

The first promising linux on a CD I found was dyne:bolic. dyne:bolic claims to be optimized for slower processors, and to be a media-centric distro. To get it running, a fast internet connection was required to downloaded the 690MB file. I used k3b (in linux) to burn a CD-R from the iso image, but I’m sure you can do the same thing in Easy CD Creator or Nero or any other CD burner program. Then I commanded the laptop to boot from CD (by selecting the correct boot device in the bios setup), placed the CD in the drive and rebooted. dyne:bolic recognized all of the hardware in the laptop and seemed to work flawlessly. dyne:bolic uses WindowMaker which is different from most of the window managers I have used, but it was really easy to figure out (especially once you realize that you need to right click to get a menu to come up!) and its really fast, which is a good thing on old machines. Happy finds in dyne:bolic include Jack (a low latency audio server) and Hydrogen (a drum machine). Plenty of audio and visual toys on this CD makes it worth a look if just to discover some new gadgets.

Knoppix was another animal entirely. This bootable CD offers a slick KDE interface which many windows users will find comforting, a huge array of useful office software and communication tools.

Either CD will allow you to test drive a full blown linux operating system in an IBM compatible PC without dual booting or partitioning the hard drive. It can even serve as machine within a mchine, the most portable of portables when you add a USB flash drive to store personal data and files. Both offer methods to store personal preferences and files onto the hard drive or a USB flash drive which should allow me to work on something, carry the CD and the flash key along, bring them to any computer anywhere and upon reboot, be working on my machine again (in a sense) as well as continue work on that particular item (since I brought it with me). The distro on a CD paradigm is pretty cool, but I wonder if the “distro on a USB 2.0″ paradigm might be even better. Stay tuned.