[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Monday 18 February 2019

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     He also brought in several copies of PLOP a boot manager for
> older machines that lets you boot from USB or CD for machines
> with old BIOSes that have no updates available.

My recollection is that the most winning feature of Plop Boot Manager 
is its ability to... I'll have to invent a word, here... cross-boot
from pretty much any bootable device to another device that would not
ordinarily be bootable.

Let's say that you have a Pentium II machine whose BIOS is so antique
that it allows the admin to boot from only

1.  the floppy drives or
2.  a drive connected to one of the four PATA ('IDE') connectors 

Let's say the Pentium II PC has one or two USB ports, but those cannot
be selected as a bootable device in the BIOS or the startup screens.
You'd like to boot it from a nice little USB flash drive, but the PC
refuses to boot from there -- frustrating.  Plop Boot Manager provides a
solution, because you can install it to your choice of a floppy disk or
to the boot sector of a PATA hard drive, and configure its boot
configuration to branch from there to the USB device upon startup.

Plop Boot Manager is really flexible in where it'll operate from and
what it'll cooperate with.  Docs:
https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/startmodes.html

It's called 'Plop', as are several related projects such as the Plop
Linux distribution, because 'Plop' is the name of author Elmar
Hanlhofer's company in Austria.

>     He also brought on the same sized disks SliTAZ 5-in-One release
> both of these are adapted to old machines with low memory.
> Both are on the very compact CD-R format sometimes called
> business card size

Wow, everything old is new again.

Business-card sized CDs were all the rage at the first LinuxWorld Expo
and Conference in San Jose (1999), because my friends and I at Linuxcare
made them famous with the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card, progenitor
of the LNX-BBC micro-distribution (from which Klaus Knopper learned the
pivot-root trick that he used to create Knoppix, the first popular
live-CD full-sized distribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card#History

Business card CDs are fun, but they have a couple of severe problems.

1.  They hold only 50MB before compression, around twice that with 
    compression.
2.  Like other optical disks, they're fragile.  Back then, I 
    cracked a couple before I learned that, no, you cannot keep
    one in your wallet, and, curse it, they're just a tiny bit
    too tall to store in one of those metal boxes that mints come in.

Over the twenty years since then, also, we've gotten BIOSes that 
are able to boot from USB and USB-type flash drives to use for that
purpose -- so I'd say there's vanishingly little practical use for 
the business-card CD format.

>     About 6:10 PM Joseph P. came in to return a disk and I was able to copy
> several files to digital media for him to use, Rescatux was one, and
> that is because SystemRescue CD has left the 32 bit machines behind.

SystemRescueCD 6.0.1 has left i386 behind, _but_ SystemRecueCD 5.3.2
is still there and I would encourage you to snarf and keep a copy
_specifically_ for its 32-bit support.

Normally, one could raise the objection to the _prior_ release of a
Linux distribution that it 's going to be left behind by newer hardware
-- but all i386 hardware is pretty ancient, so that is no problem.