[ale] some weird question

[jeff hubbs]

Stephen Turner wrote:

> i wanna make a boot floppy that will call and run
> linux from a cd.. i have these snazzy 3" cds that fit
> in a pocket and work well for a basic "console" linux
> i believe thier capacity is 185 meg... its going to be
> used for tech service to pcs that have old bios
> mostly. a tool i figured might proove valuable some
> day but perhaps im wrong? anyways should i just rig
> this up with a normal bootable floppy with a
> autoexec.bat command or is there something better? 
> 

Stephen -

Linuxcare used to have something they called the "bootable business 
card" that sounds like what you're describing.  I don't recall if 
there's a provision to generate a boot floppy for machines that can't 
boot to a CD.  I used the BBC when I volunteered for the Red Cross and 
realized that the Excel data QA they wanted me to do would go a lot 
faster using cat and grep than Excel (it would have gone faster still if 
I had my perl kung-fu).

The BBC is a good way to kind of evaluate a machine non-destructively - 
you can do "dmesg | less" to kind of see what all the kernel and modules 
saw at boot time, you can mount and mess with drives, etc.

- Jeff


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