I picked up a pretty decent laptop from work that was being thrown out, an HP Pavilion dv9568EA, it's being junked for being non-conforming, we're running Lenovo T61's/61p's these day's. Incredible! Still, my gain. Originally it came with Vista Home Premium but was down graded to WindowsXP. Believe it or not the T61p I'm now using at work came with Vista ultimate and was downgraded to XP also. Anyway I thought that when I got it home I would just restore Vista from the factory partition. However, it turns out that the boot manager has been completely screwed and this is not possible. I can purchase some disks to restore the original system but it's not worth it as I plan to install openSUSE 11.2 on this machine in a couple of weeks time. So, what to do in the mean time? I played with a number of live CD's but settled on the venerable Knoppix 6.1 which came with a recent copy of Linux Magazine. I was sufficiently impressed with this to install it to a 4GB Sandisk Cruzer USB stick with the persistent image option. It took a litlle bit of fidlling to get it to the point at which I'm completely satisfied with it, this is just a matter of becomming familiar with some of the knoppix/Debian idiocyncracies, but right now operation is indistinguishable from a full HDD install, maybe even a little faster. Running the composite desktop, full multimedia and networking plus all the knoppix utilities, all from a stick. Anyway absolutely brilliant back-up system, using it right now.
Sounds interesting. I have been unable to get the wireless and modem going in my compaq laptop under Suse 11.1. Maybe I'll give Knoppix a shot.
Connecting to my router via ethernet was completely automatic and via wireless almost trivial. Bearing in mind the similarity between Compaq and HP hardware these days I don't think you'll have a problem. I would have posted a pic showing the set up but it looks as if we are still having problems uploading immages.
You can try puppy linux which runs in memory only and can get to all the media files on the hard disk.
You can connect by different methods and it has a super fast seamonkey browser. It really impressed me
Thanks to both of you; I'll try them when I get to somewhere that has broadband. I saw someone say that Suse 11.2 has improved it's wireless stuff, so I'll be trying that when it comes out, too.
I agree, Puppy is another lightweight distro that I also rate. Currently at work I'm running a Puppy 4.3 VM on an XP host with Virtualbox. Works great. I also run a bunch of lightweight distro's from a USB stick using QEMU. All very handy.
I did try Adriane - but the voice telling me what to do didn't wash
Well, I tried Puppy 4.3.1. It was a nice distro, but it didn't recognize the wireless right off. I didn't work with it long, and then tried Knoppix 6.1. Everything seemed to work (didn't get a chance to try the modem), including the wireless. I may have to shop around, see if there's any others that work for me and I like. Thanks for the suggestions and encouragement guys. :)
I am looking forward to trying out Opensuse 11.2. I read somewhere that they've done some work on the wireless stuff and improved it quite a bit. I'll try it and see after it's been out a week or so.
