"... and now on location is JimTheCactus, Jim?" "Thanks Diane,"

Well...I'm coming to you live from my latest little experiment: Knoppix. For those of you that don't know, Knoppix is a version of Linux availible for download that runs completely from a CD. It mounts all of your hard drives as read only, and with just a small bit of tweaking, can be configured to keep the home directory on an image file on a USB flash device, effectively allowing you to operate completely independantly of whatever OS is living on the HDD. Amazingly, Knoppix uses something that I guess is like virtual memory, except that it works in reverse. From what I've been able to discern, Knoppix has a compressed filesystem living in an image file that it seems to decompress and store on a ramdisk everytime a file is called for. This method is absolutely wonderful on systems with very large amounts of memory (like mine) but would be difficault to use if you had small amounts of ram. Mostly becase with less ram, you need a larger percentage of it to accomplish the role, but for systems like mine where it allocated 407 megs of ram and left me with about 128 megs of usable ram (Which I might add, it doesn't allocate all at once, but instead allocates it dynamically, allowing you to use more of it if you aren't using too much for file caching...)

In any case, this thing is frickin' sweet. I think I'm gonna shove this disk (Or a copy of it) into my laptop bag so I can use Linux when I want to on my laptop. Not that I recommend Linux to most people as a desktop platform, since it's really more intended for terminal and server use, but who am I to complain? ;)




- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 3/23/2004 10:16:50 AM | Permalink | (0) Comments. Add your own!