Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo

[Albert Hopkins <marduk@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 21:29 +0200, Florian Philipp wrote:

> Well, actually we are using both (chainloading ntldr by grub) and if you are 
> changing the partition scheme, you might need to work with it.
> 

Sorry I was confused.

[...]

> > Sorry when I said boot via liveCD I wasn't specifically referring to the
> > Gentoo LiveCD, but "a"/"any" liveCD.  The one I always use is RIPLinux.
> > It's great for this kind of stuff.. but I actually use it on a USB stick
> > as opposed to a physical CD.  RIPLinux comes with all kinds of stuff:
> > ntfs/lvm/raid tools, partimage, [g]parted, qemu, mt, mtools, network
> > clients, cd/dvd recording software, ndiswrapper, alsa, boot-from-grub,
> > X11, etc. etc).  Fit's on a 128MB USB stick and loads right into RAM.
> > It's awesome.  You'll never look at another live cd for
> > recovery/administration again.  Don't tell anyone I said this, but it's
> > also great for installing Gentoo ;-)
> 
> Is it stable? I've tried the newest Knoppix which can copy itself into RAM, 
> too (although WAY slower because of its size the disk speed) and it always 
> crashed after some time although there was enough space left and the RAM is 
> known good.

I've been using RIPLinux for 3 years and haven't had any issues with it.
I would not compare it to Knoppix though as they have different goals.
Knoppix is more "pack as much Linux on a cd as possible" whereas
RIPLinux is made specifically for recovery and administration.   The
software list is kept down to the essentials.  The non-X version is only
about 32MB, but it contains a host of stuff that administrators need...
probably stuff that you won't find on Knoppix.  For example the last
time I used Knoppix, and it has been a while, it didn't recognize LVM
volumes.  But RIPLinux is not the type of live cd you'd want to boot and
use as a "daily" linux.  It's a tractor not sedan lol.  Because of it's
size it loads pretty quickly.  The documentation states "You'll need at
least 128MB of RAM and a 486DX CPU".  Though it will run on old hardware
it comes with the latest software... even will mount my ext4dev drive.
The X11 version will on-the-fly download the latest Firefox snapshot
from mozilla.org and load/run it from RAM if u tell it to.  It comes
with Qemu for testing images.  It can even boot itself into qemu.

Great utility.  I can't stop talking about it LOL.  The only thing I
wish it had that's missing are Amanda client and OpenVPN, but those are
not major items.

--
Albert W. Hopkins

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