"Anthony J. Albert" wrote: > > On 25 Dec 2003 at 8:07, Day Brown wrote: > >Wouldnt it be possible to setup the desktop so that if I leave the > >floppy in, it'll boot and find the dos drive, pulling up DW.exe, or > >whatever filemanager you wanted. Or- if I leave the disk out, instead of > >being on the dos desktop, have it boot loadlin from the /linux directory > >on a vfat 16, and then continue on to load the desktop, even the browser > >and ppp driver, without ever asking me for a username and password. No > >shifting from the qwerty, or the numpad, or the mouse. > > It most certainly is possible to do this. In fact, it's fairly easy. > Instead of using the boot floppy, though, I'd recommend booting from > the hard drive, then using a boot menu (either in DOS, or using one of > the Linux boot managers) to choose between continuing in DOS, or > booting Linux. I have at least two systems that do this right now. > One is configured to wait for "dos" or "lin" to tell it which to boot; > the other is configured to wait for 15 seconds, then boot DOS. I've use grub or Lilo. But- they need me to be *at the pc* during the boot. with the floppy, I turn on the pc, either leave it in, or not, then leave to get coffee. When I get back, which ever I wanted is waiting for me, rather than me waiting for it.
> >But BL could also do the ext2 drive. Which it treats as data storage, > >relying on the fat16 for the copies of its own OS Kernel... which it > >copies onto a ramdisk, and runs from there. So it would seem that if it > >got infected with sabotage software, wouldnt it be cured every time you > >rebooted? And who cares what the sabotage software does to the kernel it > >thinks is on the ext2 drive, since it dont boot off it. > > Sure could do this - BL's ramdisk boot process could be set up to mount > a partition every time it loads - and that partition could easily mount > as /home/root, for automatic availability as the "home" "data storage" > location. > > There are a number of people who have used BL in configurations similar > to this, for setting up firewalls, data loggers, and other similar > tasks, on older PC hardware. BasicLinux has been, in my opinion, a > boon to those with SurvPCs - because it runs very well on SurvPC class > hardware, and can be configured to do so many nifty things! > > Have a look at the BasicLinux mailing list and archives, and you'll > surely find some of those uses described. > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux Yeah, I've subbed. well worth it. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
