Monday, I used a giftcard to purchase, "Knoppix Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools," by Kyle Rankin. The book includes a CD-Rom with version 3.4 of Knoppix Linux. A little old, as they're up to something like 3.7 now. I'm using it on an old notebook I have right now, and using the Mozilla web browser.
Why would you want to do this? Well, for one thing, it's difficult for Windows viruses to run when you're not running Windows. More info at
http://www.knoppix.org
If you have enough RAM, the contents of the CD-Rom can actually be copied into RAM when it first boots. And while you need a minimum of one gigabyte of RAM for this option, it is supposed to run much faster. A much smaller variant is Damn Small Linux at
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org
which is only 50MB total, and can be transferred into 256MB of RAM.
However, if I wanted to run Linux directly from RAM, and if I had a 256MB RAM system, I'd probably opt for Feather Linux which is slightly over a 100MB download. This because Feather, a variant of DSL("Damn Small Linux") includes the Firefox browser, while DSL does not. BTW, you can purchase DSL on a business-card-sized CD-Rom, or already installed on a USB flash drive if your system can boot from a USB device. Or simply download and burn a CD. Btw, Feather also has a USB-bootable version.
Feather Linux at
http://www.featherlinux.berlios.de
I know this will not appeal to everyone, but I'm looking for every possible wayI can find to avoid viruses, etc. Plus, it's interesting to learn & use a different operating system without having to alter the harddrive Windows resides upon. Have fun!
PhaedrusZ



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