[TAG] Booting a "Live CD" image without a CD

[Robos]

On Thu, 17.03.05, Ben Okopnik <ben at linuxgazette.net> wrote:
> Hi, all -

Hi Ben and List.

> Got a curious Linux problem here that I'm trying to puzzle out, and
> after struggling with it for a bit, I remembered that I'd heard of this
> thing called The Answer Gang... :)
> 
> I'm trying to boot Linux on my fiancee's laptop, a Sony VAIO F590K -
> something that she'd be quite happy to see, since her opinion is that
> Micr0s0ft should have stopped when the going was good - i.e., DOS5.0
> Simple, right? Uh, well... the only problem is that it's got a dead
> CD-ROM drive. She's going to order a new one soon, but until then...
>
> The VAIO doesn't support booting from USB. However, I've managed to load
> Puppy Linux onto a 1GB USB FlashDrive and burn the appropriate disk image
> (provided by Puppy) to a floppy - it's an ingenious system (the floppy
> boots FreeDOS, which searches for and boots the FlashDrive) that could
> probably be easily adapted to boot other distros... if I only understood
> exactly what to tweak and how. :) I'm afraid that I've met my match (at
> least for the moment) in trying to understand the whole shebang.
> 
> I've looked at many LiveCD distros in the past few days. A number of
> them can be run from USB - but require that the machine boot from the
> USB, not an option here. I've even carefully studied the "Booting
> Knoppix from USB" HOWTO, which assumes the same thing, to see if I could
> somehow mingle Puppy's floppy boot and Knoppix on a USB stick... no
> luck.
> 
> Oh, and PXE booting is out as well: the F590K does support network
> booting... however, PXE does not (yet) speak PCMCIA.
> 
> So, given all of the above - what do you folks think? Have any of you
> had experience in booting something like this, or do you have any ideas
> that I've perhaps missed?

Well, if you only want to show her the livecd, how about you use and emulator?
Lately I've been using qemu a lot and it works like hell! Fabrice Bellard is
really a god. Ah, and if she has winblows on that machine, how about this
link:
http://home.btconnect.com/chrisandcarolyn/torrents/KNOPPIX_V3.8-2005-02-28-CeBIT_Edition-qemu-0.6.1-2.iso.torrent
Well, I tried it once (screenshot here: http://vobcopy.org/pictures/fun_with_qemu.thumbnail.jpg)
and the folks that made the .bat file made some errors IMHO: -m should be
more in the range of 128 (smaller than what shm has, whatever that means on
winblows) and I think the error message in the pic also came from an error 
of theirs but hey, it's close.
BTW: qemu with kqemu (the kernel module he has now on linux) gives really a
speedup to ~70% native cpu speed. Awesome (that's why win4lin pro uses qemu
underneath)
Helps?
Cheers
Robos

> * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *
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-- 
Robos - 
gpg --recv-keys --keyserver blackhole.pca.dfn.de 6EEADA09
It's GNU/Linux dammit! F U M $ !