[Gllug] Re: Bootable pen drives again

[salsaman at xs4all.nl]

On Tue, February 13, 2007 08:20, Mark Williams wrote:
> On Monday 12 Feb 2007 22:38, Christopher Currie wrote:
>> On  Sun, 11 Feb 2007 14:42:01 +0100 (CET)
>>
>>  salsaman at xs4all.nl wrote:
>> > You might want to check this out:
>> >
>> > http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mandriva-Flash-Available-41825.shtml
>> >
>> > "Mandriva Flash is a pre-installed Mandriva Linux distribution on a
>> > simple 2GB USB flash drive."
>> >
>> > Gabriel.
>>
>> Many thanks. Spot on. It looks impressive, but at 79 Euros it should be.
>> Though they charge 44 euros for the download version of Mandriva
>> Discovery,
>> so the stick is not all that more.
>>
>> But ' take it everywhere and make any desktop your own!' seems a bit
>> much,
>> given the problems with BIOS and USB booting that have been discussed
>> here.
>>
>
> I have to say, I've had no great trouble booting things from USB unless I
> go
> to antique PC's. It's getting the stick to take an image that's been
> trouble.
>
> DSL will split a stick to 2 drives - 1 small image + a data area - if you
> use
> the USB-ZIP option, which some BIOSes seem to need. Fdisk removes them &
> mkfs
> restores normality if wanted. The 'toram' option is so fast it would be
> really impressive, if it had any big apps to load quickly ;)
>
> I haven't bought a Mandriva stick (though I generally use their distro)
> but
> imagine it's based on the bootable CD/DVD version, which is fairly
> comprehensive.


Yes, I had a look at their site; it seems like the stick comes with a very
basic install, and then the first time you boot with it it lets you make a
package/config selection, so you can set it up with language settings and
so on. 1 gig is used as a system disk, and the other 1 gig is left free
for data. Looks pretty good to me. I've been using Mandriva as my desktop
for past 3 or 4 years, what I like about is that the install is generally
very smooth - I have yet to find a machine it failed on; and also their
multimedia support is very good. They also support the "Penguin Liberation
Front", who make a lot of non-Free packages like xvid.

Cheers,
Gabriel.



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