On Dec 30, 2011, at 4:22 AM, Markus Hitter wrote: > You two should have a look at Linux LiveCDs, e.g. Ubuntu. Download a copy, > burn it to CD/DVD, put the thing into the drive, reboot and you're up. No > typing, no manual configuration, no headaches.
They are quite impressive. 650MB and it'll boot an enormous assortment of hardware. The same 32-bit Fedora 16 Live CD will boot a 6 year old ancient Dell laptop I accidentally acquired, as well as a 2011 MacbookPro. There are no doubt thousands of computer models that can be booted. > > LiveCDs automatically detect and use swap partitions on available hard disks, > give you a fully functional user account, give access to network and all > hardware and even allow installation of additional packages without touching > the hard disk. > > It's amazing, far ahead of Mac OS X. The various linux LiveCDs are far ahead of what Apple has historically produced. But Recovery HD is similar to a linux Live CD. It's 650MB in size, and isn't a mounted filesystem, instead the bulk of the data is contained in a read-only disk image which is what gets mounted. You can browse the web and run a few utilities. Granted, a linux LiveCD presents a desktop environment, and will let you install almost any piece of software you have memory or swap space for... > If you do the few additional steps of putting the distribution ISO onto an > USB stick, it's even fast. And for USB, another option is setting up a persistent layer. So any changes made, such as installing software, or saving documents, remains on the USB stick, through reboots. But USB booting on Apple hardware is highly problematic. The CSM-BIOS boot doesn't support it. And EFI boot, while it will boot off USB, has various other problems during the boot process - that so far in my experience make it non-viable unless it's Mac OS X. Such is life with non-standard firmware. Chris Muprhy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
