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

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 2/20/19 2:26 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> 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

     I remember those well.  I have a copy(somewhere) but I am not sure 
it is functional.
>
> 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.

     I can haul them along in a handbag or in a tote-able computer case.
     These are fragile and a case to protect them would be nice but 
otherwise
they are wrapped in paper secured with a rubber band.

>
> 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.

     Well the donor likes to keep old machines operating and doubtless
finds use for it.  If anyone else is interested they can request a copy of
either PLOP or Slitaz and I will have it at the next meeting.  If the 
business
card sized CD run out I imagine we can get it on regular CD or on a
flash drive if appropriate.

>>      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.
No worry I am a collector and keep all sorts of things around
file:///media/Portable 
1/ISOs/SystemRescueCDLive/systemrescuecd-x86-5.3.2.iso

But rescatux-0.51b3.iso works on 32 and 64 bit machines and Joseph needed
a copy to a flash drive as that is the inputs he has on his machine which is
small and Intel Atom powered.

And Slitaz 5 works on i5/i7 machines if you really want to cut down on
the size of your distribution.  I did not manage to get it online on WiFi
though.  Maybe it needed an update but that will take a wired connecton
I believe.


>
> 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.
>
         There will be quite a few 386 machines out there being used by 
poorer people
than we are in places where a hardware update has never been written 
into budgets.

             Bobbie Sellers

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