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SuperSlak - Linux On A SuperDisk 93

Posted by Hemos from the install-anywhere dept.
_EternaL_ writes: "What could be more fun then hitting the eject button on your floppy drive, and swapping out your root file system? You say you don't wanna partition your hard drive to play with Linux? That's no excuse, install to your superdisk! Now there's a solution for anyone interested in getting a feel for Linux that doesn't have the space or time to install Linux on a hard drive, but has a Superdisk drive! Folks out there might be interested in knowing that installation to an internal ls120 (ie: SuperDisk) is possible. It took a bit of work, but thanks to moomonk it's fairly easy. You might wanna check out the basic howto over at electricgod.net. If that's not working out for you, you can also try over at dokks.com!"
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SuperSlak - Linux on a SuperDisk More

SuperSlak - Linux on a SuperDisk

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  • Some of us geeks have no regular floppy drive and just have a superdisk drive instead. This sounds really cool.
  • > Make a Linux Distro that can boot from a CD, and defaults
    > to a Zip or something else for saving.
    Like DemoLinux [demolinux.org]? It is based on Debian and does pretty much all you want, plus more.
  • I've got a Toshiba Tecra 8100 portable with a Superdisk drive that fits in the removable-drive bay. I've currently got the CDROM in there instead, and this is the first thing I've seen that's a real motivation to use the Superdisk/floppy instead, since most new software installs from CD instead of floppy these days. I'll be able to run Linux without risking Partition Magic or other repartition-in-place tools.

    (Why did I pick that machine? Bureaucrats from the Great Headquarters In New Jersey decided that people in the field needed 5.5-pound over-spec'd shoulder-breaking machines instead of 2.5-pound good-enough machines :-) They also decided we needed all 12GB of disk in one big Win98 partition to harass leftover MSDOS programs and people who want Linux partitions for tools in addition to Win98 for office apps...

  • Make a Linux Distro that can boot from a CD,
    I am totally with you. Few PCs have LS120 SuperDisk drives, and not many more have Zip drives. But CD ROM drives are ubiquitous. Carry a single CD with you, drop it in any PC anywhere, and bam, you're running Linux.

    In the simple version, it would boot off CD, and look for local fd drives and hd partitions to auto-mount. The all-singing all-dancing version would scan those partitions, and look for a Windows registry with clues as to what name and IP number it should be; and wander out on the LAN and look for SMB shares to mount. It could come with tools to roll a new CD, with new apps etc.

    Maybe it should be called Ronix, for Read-Only Linux.

    Does anybody know if anything like this already exists?

  • MoonFalln on #linuxhelp on the Undernet is doing just suck a thing. Try there.
  • "...I've done it with Debian."

    eewwww gross!! LIke totally, Debian is a total, like, GEEK! his eyeglasses even smell bad! imroy like totally has geek cooties now, I'm soooo sure!

    or maybe as a bumper sticker?
    -=(V)0(V)0cr0(V)3=-
  • Why would people, especially those that use linux and know it at all, be surprised at all? Linux can be installed to *any* media where the appropriate drivers (read: kernel code) exists.

    Zip. Superdisk. Floppies. M-systems Disk-on-chip, hard disk, network boot.... all kinds of flash...

    Seriously.. where's the news?
  • I remember when I first tried out Linux. I installed Slackware back in 1994. I had a 386-33 with an 80MB hard drive. That included X.

    And now everyone is amazed that Linux can fit on an LS120.

  • hmmm.. good idea.. I installed Linux on a Jaz disk in '97, but since I got a dedicated box I haven't messed with it much... think I'll go distribution crazy now.. got lots of empty Jaz Disks just cryin for BSDs and different distros of Linux. Thanks!!

    JOhn
  • Why not! There ae many people who have LS120 dives, for a number of reasons. Many, like myself, bought them when the Zip was only 100MB and the extra 20MB was a BIG advantage. Also, there are many people who, like myself, find a number of other advantages to the ls120:

    1. The drive can handle ordinary FDDs - this is useful especially for laptops, or parport drives.
    2. The smaller size of the media makes it easier to carry around/store.
    3. Cross platform compatibility is excellent. The zip requires special formats (in my experience, I expect someone has found a way to deal with this by now)
    4. It looks just like a removable hdd and can even be partitioned. (I've never tried this with a zip, so don't know if this is possible). This makes it SO easy to install/boot new op syses. (Handy when dev'ing an embedded Linux :))

    Of course, the downside is the cost of the media...

    As regards Bootable CD Distros, there are already a number. I myself use the Slakware 7 disk which makes an evil recovery disk, so complaining that a Superdisk distro is a waste of time is a little superfluous.

    The real point, though, comes back the the original 'spirit' of open source operating systems and hacking. Back in the dark ages, when Linux was just starting up, there were many people with lots of different, and obsolete hardware who wanted to use it sensibly, partly because of finances, partly from the challenge. The philospohy of supporting as much h/w as possible was common place and people were applauded for creating support for new systems/hardware, not pilloried. This is one of the reasons that Linux/**BSD etc have all been so successful.

    The 'one-horse' culture of the M$ Windows mentality is something that should be avoided at all costs if we wish to have a dynamic computer culture.


  • (semi-related I have an antiquated Mac 68040 running NetBSD off an old 100 MB SCSI Zip drive which works very well.)

    If you want to make a hard diskless router or workstation you can get PicoBSD, essentially a stripped FreeBSD-on-a-floppy.

    http://people.FreeBSD.org/~picobsd/picobsd.html

    I have set up a few NATD/IPFW boxes on old 486es using this.

  • There are apparently several versions of the ORB drive. SCSI, IDE, USB, AND FireWire. I've heard that the speed is pretty good on this thing, and the price is hard to beat too. $30 for a 2.2GB disk. $199 for the drive with a disk. So, does anyone know if there are or will be Linux drivers for it?

  • > "...I've done it with Debian."

    >
    > eewwww gross!! LIke totally, Debian is a total,
    > like, GEEK! his eyeglasses even smell bad! imroy
    > like totally has geek cooties now, I'm soooo
    > sure!

    Ah crap, I was sitting too close to the group of nineth-graders... ;)

    Does the name "imroy" sound female?
    oh well... I always play games as female characters anyway :P
    ....as long as I don't get hit on, OK?

  • Linuxcare has a bootable business card. It's a small Debian linux distro with about 108MB of tools I think. I think it even has xwindows. It was made to fit on one of those smaller CDs but the ISO works just fine on a regular CD-R. I have found it very usefull. http://www.linuxcare.com/bootable_cd/index.epl

  • does anything outside of /var need to be writeable (as in, all the time)? /proc isn't on the disk, and /dev doesn't really need to be writeable...
  • It used to be possible to install to Zip disks circa Redhat 4.2 via the actual installation process, and with some development tools.

    After that release RHL got just too bloated. Even when not installing X, RH insisted on installing a bunch of X-related stuff anyway. You could still get a RHL onto a zip, but you had to install to a regular HD and then remove a crapload of packages to get down below 100MB.

    I never used mine as anything more than a fixit disk, so I didn't care about swap space (my machines all had more than 128MB RAM anyway), X windows, alternate shells or any other luxuries. I imagine I could have used a floppy, but I was able to fit more tools (networking, compression, archiving, drivers, devices, etc) onto a zip with much less work.

  • Last time I checked to get an accelerated X server, true type font support, wysiwyg text editing, an integrated desktop environment, you needed a fairly sizable install of linux.

    Certainly windows wont do servers or routing particularly well. Actually winroute is only 700k and works adequately, but the bulk of routing and fileserving on our home network is done by our linux machine - and the correllary - the bulk of client machines run windows.

    A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.
  • At one point i had about a 16 Meg zip file, which extracted to a 32mb ram disk, which I then was able to start Win95 from in safe mode. Sadly I never acheived full graphical mode since it would have been ideal for pissing about on the university networks :)
  • Altering ZipSlack? I did read the site... this big "alteration" is changing the directory structure. Big Whoop-de-doo. I dunno, I just don't think it's news enough for a /. article.
  • /etc/fstab may need to be writable. Perhaps others. And you didn't mention /tmp.

    Then there's swap, of course, but I guess we're just talking about filesystems.
    --

  • Wow! Sounds great but: I have admin access on our Physics' dept NT machines. Thought to do a run around (hehe). Unfortunately NT doesn't have a "reboot into DOS" mode. Also: even after setting floopy to be active at boot time the system went straight to the NT OS installer (options: NT or NT VGA). hmmm... I might have to opt for VMware (student discount around $99).
  • The way this is worded, doesnt it sound like he is a washed up LS-120 salesman? Why not just shout "PLEASE!! buy one of these slow drives with a not startling amount of capacity!!!" Almost seems like I fell asleep and woke up to one of those horrid commercials you see only in the wee hours of the morn. (Wait wouldnt I coding at that time of night anyway, hmm..) The only part he forgot to mention is that you can make up on all that lost sleep waiting for linux to boot off one of these drives. My 2 cents.

    me

  • four words: IDE ZIP rescue disk! (Score:3)

    by coyote-san ( 38515 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @06:32PM (#905731)
    Been there, done that. If you have a reasonably recent MB and an IDE (or SCSI :-) ZIP disk you can install a "minimal" Debian system to a ZIP - and later boot from it.

    Instant monster rescue disk!

    It's even better than that, because a minimal Debian install is only 25 MB or so, so you can stuff the remaining 75 MB or so with almost anything you can imagine. You don't have enough disk space to rebuild the kernel, X11, or glibc, but you definitely have enough room to have a reasonably complete compiler set that will allow you to build/rebuild any reasonably sized program. That's a lot more than you can say about 1-3 floppy rescue disks!

    I haven't played with the 250 MB ZIP drives (the ATAPI ones just came out), but I have put ATAPI ZIP drives into all of my systems (except the laptop) specifically because they have proven themselves so useful when things go horribly wrong. In fact, I've even swapped out the floppy drive for the ZIP drive in most of those systems!
  • I'd hate to see the speed difference as soon as this thing started swapping from the LS disk. Virtual whiplash!
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.

  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just a rehash of ZipSlack? ZipSlack has been around for a LONG time, and fits on a 100MB disk. Sure, if you want to use an LS-120 drive instead, you might need to mess with some configuration, but it's still basically the same deal. No real news here at all.

  • I've successfully install Windows 95(B/C revision) to a bootable CD, I had a friend do it with a zip disk.

    What I'd like to be able to do is take "my configuration" of my computer on a disk and take it to work or school so I have my own set-up and the UI arranged the way I want.

    What would be neat would be to be able to take your root file system out and just have it "work" in any computer you plugged it into, or flip it around and be able to hot-plug an OS. (Put your OS disk in and magically have Linux instead of Windows.) I'd like to be able to try out new versions of operating systems without having to make space on my hard drive to install them to and then screw up the file system if I don't like it.

    How many of you wish you could customize that plain UI? (Windows/Linux/MacOS/whatever) so you have the same UI as you do at home?

    I'd love to be able to do that, or hot-swap different UI's (Here's your chance you censorshipware lovers, Make your kids a UI disk so they don't screw up YOUR lovely settings hehehe.)

    Though to get back to the original idea about being able to stick an entire working linux filesystem on a bootable media, It's an excellect concept, but doesn't have much of a practical use.

    One potential use I see is being able to take "your computer" places without taking the entire thing OR, if a company had a pile of laptops, and "User Disks" to boot the things off of so employees could just use any laptop at will (or even any workstation in a building)

  • moomonk here (eternal & dokks can vouch for that). I didn't have this ready for release when I just noticed the story on /.. Damn ;-) Well anywhoo... This is really three things. At color.gz [dokks.com]: A replacement for Slackware's color.gz root disk that will install directly to an ATA floppy drive (could be Zip if you felt like it). I didn't get around to putting the support for creating swap files on the root device so you'll have to do that yourself. Besides that it works peachy. Linux works much better on an ext2 filesystem then UMSDOS on a superdisk. I had X running with Mozilla off a disk from this earlier last week. It's slick for having a quickie system. par-pf.i [dokks.com]: Almost like Slackware's paride.i boot disk except that it actually works. The Slackware boot disk includes the driver for paride CD/IDE/ATA floppy/ATA disk/ATA generic and the combination of them all breaks the disk. This only loads the ATA floppy driver but is otherwise identical. suprdisk.txt [dokks.com]: Some notes on installing several distributions directly to a SuperDisk. In general, Debian and Slackware can be coerced (and with color.gz Slack even likes it). Mandrake and Red Hat were plain broken and aren't worth bothering with. SuSe also worked nice but was too large to be useful. In general, the idea to tricking the installer is to mount the superdisk at the installation mount point and then get the installer to ignore any linux partitions. You can get Slackware to install using the default color.gz if you have a linux partition and just mount the disk at /mnt. The installer doesn't need to touch the linux partition, it just needs to see one. For debian mount the disk at /target, skip the install section, ignore the error and then continue. The most important bit wasn't done at all. H. Peter Anvin's SYSLINUX works really slick if you have a UMSDOS file system like ZipSlack. Just unzip ZipSlack to the floppy, unzip 120linux.zip [dokks.com] to the floppy and then run the syslinux program on the disk. The zip includes all the required configuration files. Under linux this is syslinux -s /dev/hd? where ? is a-d for a=primary, master b=primary, slave c=secondary, master d=secondary. If you'd like to have a ext2 file system you should use lilo. Go ahead and use a generic lilo configuration file. Just be sure to include this additional bit: disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd The idea is to trick the boot loader to access the floppy device on boot. The linux kernel will get it right later so you'll set your root to something like /dev/hdc or the ilk. My lilo.conf looks like # LILO start prompt default=3 # because i like my configuration to boot nicely message=/boot/message.txt # it describes the images 1-4 compact image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda label=1 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb label=2 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc label=3 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdd label=4 single-key read-only disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd bios=0x00 #LILO end eternal may have mirred these files to electricgod.net but their home is on dokks.com
  • Those "virtual" hard drives make starting your x86 emulator with a different OS easy. I have Win and an SUSE disc. It works well, only a little slow.

    So I went and got a copy of linuxppc. Now I dual boot. (athough linuxppc will boot off the cd)

  • OLD NEWS! It's been successfuly done many times with other media no matter what the size

    I've personally managed to fit it on a 100MB ZiP disk, a 1.44 MB Floppy & even some success on a flash ROM (can't remember the size though) and all of them ran like it was running from a HDD. So what's the big deal of running it off your SuperDisk?

    If you really want news try squeezing Winxows 9x into 1 SuperDisk and run it from there!

    Winxows 9x:
    A 32-bit extension of
    a 16-bit OS meant for
    a 8-bit processor which originated from
    a 4-bit microprocessor by
    a 2-bit company which can't stand
    1-bit of competition

    -----

  • Push the eject button while they're not looking.

    ls: command not found
  • awww, I didn't mean to imply you were female (or male) as I would imagine your uid stands for "I Am Roy".

    I just thought your opening line was funny in a beavis and butthead sorta way, only I figured pre-pubescent valley-girls seem more likely to say 'did it' in that oooh-gross way. At least as far as I can tell, with nothing more to go off than my datastore of confused social stereotypes derived from NBC, certain hygeine commercials and field trips to the Starbucks chain of coffee shops...

    otherwise, I found your post more or less worthwhile.
    -=(V)0(V)0cr0(V)3=-
  • I should mention that the older drives were significantly slower and not particularly suited to running an OS from. The newer drives (within the last year or so) are much faster and run Linux just fine. The performance is better using native ext2 instead of the flakey UMSDOS (even I don't like it)

    moomonk
  • Dude, Slackware 7.1 is the Smoothest install I have ever encountered in ANY dinstribution. And there's more: 1) at least with Slackware I know I'm getting a System that has been engineered for stability instead of for keeping up with the latest beta version of glib; 2) with slackware I'n sure there's no Graphical Dummy-Mode config program which F*CKS up my hand-crafted configuration files.
  • If you get a slackware distrib from CDROM.com you get a CD with a live filesystem too.
  • For Au$ 20 (or so) I can buy a mobile frame set that lets me plugin (but -not- hot swap) a Hard Drive of my choice. I can buy extra "drawers" for the frame set (i.e. a frame installed in the case, any number of insertable drawers, each with a standard disk drive - IDE or SCSI2, depending on model of frame & drawers).

    I suppose that loading & access times are quicker with this solution than with LS120's and [some] Zip drives.

    So, equipped with a set of older hard disks - with FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, Win xx[xx], et al. - on each one, I'm multi-op-sys capable with no chance of interference to one op sys's files by another, since only one is spinning at a time.

    While it's possible to keep the computer case open and just keep plugging in the hard disk of choice... there are reasons NOT to do it this way: 1) IDE/SCSI cable assemblies live longer when I use mobile frames, 2) circuit boards don't need dust... and 3) my neighbour doesn't need any more RFI (= radio frequency interference).

    I also save $ (e.g. cost of yet -another- proprietary hardware gizmo) and can also put to use those old hard drives that always seem to be stacking up in a dusty corner.

    My vote for K.I.S.S. Too easy! :)

  • This isn't really new news at all.

    The guys at Slackware have been providing a distro that is specifically for removable media like LS120 drives. This is called ZipSlack.

    Okay, it is more targetted for Zip drives (hence the name), but I'm sure with little or no adaption it could be made to work perfectly well with a LS120 drive.

    Plus, this package isn't really suited, as far as I can see, for the linux newbie who wants to give Linux a try and doesn't want to repartition.

    If he's really desperate there are Linuces out there that install in a FAT partition and run from Windows (WinLinux springs to mind in particular - urgh).

    What's more, there are 100s of "mini-distributions" that are under 100Mb and would easily fit on a LS120 drive - this really isn't new news, guys.
    --
    jambo
    system.admin.without.a.clue
  • Click here [demolinux.org].
    It comes on a free CD.
    It works, recognizes anything in your computer and it is fully featured (KDE, Emacs, Netscape, GCC, Perl, etc.).
    I use it on sensible servers.
    you only need to be able to boot on a CD.
    BTW, who deliberately bought an LS, here ?
    --
  • They read regular floppies about 5-10 times faster than a regular drive. I've booted Partition Magic off an LS120 in 5 seconds, versus almost a minute in a regular drive. They're also less destructive on floppy disks, and are supposed to often be able to read bad floppies when other drives have given up.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu
  • Surely you cant boot from a USB ls-120 drive?!!
  • Well, I know hard drives are cheap, but I don't yet regard them as an exchangeable media :->

    Get a couple of removable drive bays and they are. The only problems are running out of IDE slots ( esp. if you have a both a CD-ROM and a CD-RW), and master/slave jumper settings.
  • CONTACT ME!!!

    I've been trying to get a Win95 to boot from a cd so I can take it to univeristy with me except that i've never managed to get any better than booting it in safe mode. Win98 would be ideal since it has usb support.

    graha.ms(at)graha.ms
  • There is a distro that runs from cd. It is called DemoLinux at http://www.demolinux.org . It can save to floppys, zip or your hard drive. And if you have a hardware modem it can dial out too.
  • Emmm i've managed to get windows 95 to boot quite happily from an 100Mb disk.

    It's really quite simple... copy your windows directory to the A: drive, sys the A: drive to make it bootable, edit MSDOS.SYS to set the correct path up to find windows and you are set.

    Something all you linux people do seem quite keen to forget is that m$ software is nowhere near as bloated as linux's. You can slim down a Win95 distribution and get it in 25 Megs I think. And that's a full graphical OS (well OS is too strong a word :) and that includes a copy of wordpad which isn't too bad a text editor.
  • Ah, I see. My bad. I shouldn't post at 11:08 PM. :-)

    It seems as though /. is running low on articles of late.
    -aardvarko
    webmaster at aardvarko dot com
  • I've got an external SCSI Orb, and it works great with Linux and *BSD. It shows up as a scsi hard drive.

    The only problem is it isn't supported as removeable media. If you boot up without a disk in the drive, linux won't see the drive, and swapping disks once linux is booted doesn't work to well.

  • They have stolen my idea! I did that a few days ago, but I used LFS [linuxfromscratch.org] instead, and it works great. Even internet via ISDN!
  • this is pretty much zipslack but now it supports ls120 drives... Ok, if you have one it would be nice, but must people don't. What I find an even better idea is the linuxcare bootable business card. Take a look here [linuxcare.com]. You just burn this iso image to a cd and you have a bootable linux that would work on a lot more machines than an ls120 or even a zip disk because its on a CD! Seeing as this is based off tomsrbt and made for business card size CD's there is plenty of room to add your own extras if you arent new to linux. I am thinking about adding soundcard support and throwing some mp3 files on it ;-)

    _joshua_

  • This isn't the first time Slack did this... (Score:4)

    by dark_panda ( 177006 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @04:38PM (#905756)
    Remember ZipSlack [slackware.com]? It was quite similar, but used a 100 MB Zip disk. It also usd the UMSDOS filesystem, and thus could simply be placed into a Windows/DOS directory and used from there.

    This is still cool, though, because I have an LS-120 and not a Zip drive.

    J

  • Slackware is behind the race on some stuff, and
    they only make an intel distro, but ZipSlack
    and this SmartDisk Slack are among the most
    handy things they've done... Portable Linux
    is not to be underrated... I'm always
    finding myself at hostile computers, and I
    love just running my own little Linux on it
    for a few minutes and then just rebooting
    it and having it be none-the-wiser..
  • Um, pardon my asking, but what in the world is a SuperDisk? Is it at all like a Zip disk, or is it just a really big hard drive? Would somebody mind clarifying this for the audiences keeping scoring at home.
  • Le superdisk is a 120 MB floppy. It's drive can be used to access floppies or the 120 mb thing. With harddrives less than $75 bucks, I cannot believe that any true geek would have a SUPERDRIVE and not a simple, old, 500 mb or so harddrive.

    .sig
  • The LS120 drive is very slow, even more so than a Zip drive. And Zips are 250 MB. I just wonder, the SuperDisk drive never really caught on, and very few people use them. Is this really very useful. Why not focus some effort on running it off of a Zip drive, or creating some kind of nice CD distro that has a bazillion drivers and lets you save everything automatically to another drive? Eh? Make it easy for the user!

    Make a Linux Distro that can boot from a CD, and defaults to a Zip or something else for saving. Let you install apps on the zip, and use some scripts to load everything from there.

    But then again...why are any of these ideas useful? Whose gonna run Linux off a zip or LS120 anyway? Why?
  • Cool! Magic. I've never hit the refresh button on a slashdot home page and seen everything move UP! Must be internal constipation in the servers...

    .sig
  • hey, if you flip the write protect tab on the disk, your installation would be pretty secure: if your ever compromised, take it off the net and reboot: it'll be back to the way it was. Then, patch the security hole that was exploited (with the write protect off) and bring it back online.
  • I bought a SuperDisk drive because:
    • Zip's "click of death" problems.
    • Iomega was screwing customers on rebates.
    • SuperDisk drive can read/write 1.44M floppies.
    I have been very happy with my SuperDisk drive. The drive and diskettes have been error free.
  • A SuperDisk [superdisk.com] is similar to a Zip disk. It has a capacity of 120 MB and looks very similar to a standard 3.5" floppy disk. (Actually, it's dimensions are identical, and the only real difference in appearance is the shutter.)

    SuperDisk is an Imation technology. It's closed, which really sucks, because one of the reasons the 3.5" floppy because such a hit was because anyone could make them. Not so with the SuperDisk.

    SuperDisks only work with SuperDisk drives, like the LS-120, although they will fit in a regular floppy drive. SuperDisk drives are also backwardly compatible with regular floppies. USB, parallel, serial and internal models are available.

    I have one, but only because it was free. I find it useful for taking home big files from work, since I have a T1 connection at work and a 33.6 connection at home. I'm not a fan of the closed nature of Imation and their SuperDisks, but it comes in handy when I'm taking home 10 mp3s or some mpegs.

    J
  • Well, I know hard drives are cheap, but I don't yet regard them as an exchangeable media :->
  • Uh, read the site.

    "A copy of ZipSlack from Slackware (from here on referred to as SuperSlack heh)"

    "Credit for SuperSlack goes to moomonk@dokks.com for altering ZipSlack so that it works on the SuperDisk drive. Feel free to copy, distribute or modify the files found on this server in any way you please. All terms of the GPL apply. "

    -aardvarko
    webmaster at aardvarko dot com
  • Linux seems to be maturing to a point where
    Howtos are actually geared to the mainstream
    audience. It is nice to see basic Windows
    routines explained step by step.

  • Website developers could use the portable OS (WIN, LINUX, whatever) as applications to support the different browsers and to create web-directories in the appropriate formats for each.

    Beats hunting through dumpsters to find workable computers on which to install Netscape, I.E., etc.

  • "I just wonder, the SuperDisk drive never really caught on, and very few people use them. Is this really very useful. Why not focus some effort on running it off of a Zip drive..."

    This sort of logic is the same sort of logic that made/makes large numbers of people and businesses run, select, or switch over to Microsoft Windows systems... 'gee, that _fill in your favorite superior computing platform here_ never caught on, why should we bother using it?'

    While I wont debate your point of whether it is slower or not than ZIP -- I don't personally have a SuperDisk drive, and haven't the information infront of me to debate the technical points. I think the issue is one of P.R. and Advertising.
    Iomega simply had better PR people.

    I would personally rather have a drive that I can use both 3 1/2" and 120 meg disks in, not to mention 120megs is still more than the 100 meg Zip disks that the SuperDisks were/are competeing against.

    There are of course lots of other issues, such as cost of media, installed base, speed, etc...

    But it's really a matter of marketing and merchandising, early on enough, Iomega was able to conquer the market enough so that "well noone else uses them (that I know of) so why should I?" logic begins to make sense... it becomes a matter of installed user base (I can go over a friends) and also of the economy of scale.

    At very least this is just Yet Another Option... and why reject more possibilities for people who have the technology? Given, not everyone here is a Linux advocate... but it's still a possibility for technology sake, making it possible for people to do more with whatever they have available.

    Personally I have been waiting a long time for this to come along -- I thought it was blatantly obvious to do a "SuperSlack" when I first heard of ZipSlack.

    [And of course, the argument that doesn't need to be mentioned: "why not focus some effort on running it off of a Zip drive?" Well, that effort and possibility is already there.]
  • Can you have Linux boot and work off of
    CD alone. I mean, no swap, no nothing,
    never alter any settings for any reason.
    Are there ISO images of such a beast?
  • SuperDisk is faster than floppy but slower than Zip. I remember reading several reviews, let's see if I can find one...

    Okay, here: http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/trends/0,7607,2 522362,00.html

    It doesn't give very much info, but I think the concensus at the time was that the original Zip 100/Parallel was 15x a floppy, and the 3M LS120 (Later SuperDisk) was only 6x - 8x
  • I'm used to old news on slashdot but this tops everything - I keep a rescue ZIP with a complete NetBSD for several years now. My HP boots from a ZIP more or less regulary. WTF is so exciting about doing this with a SuperDisk ?

  • The issue of "it isn't popular, so let's not use it" is VERY important when it comes to media. Why do you think EVERYONE has a floppy drive (well, with the exception of the new Macs)? Standards in things like storage, protocols, etc. are necessary. Zip never became a standard, but they did sell several million more drives than Imation, so it seems they are more entrenched.

    You are correct, there is no reason why NOT to have Linux-on-SuperDisk, except that I wonder about the usefulness of it, especially due to the rarity of SuperDisk drives.
  • There are tricks that involve copying the must-be-writeable stuff from the read only media to a ram disk and mounting that over the initial read-only filesystem. This is a bit of a hassle, though (the boot process becomes a little complicated and nonstandard), which is why you don't see any popular linux-on-a-cd distros.

    I don't think there's any fundamental reason why you can't easily run most operating systems off read-only media. It just wasn't planned for.
    --

  • Actually I managed to squeezed an OSR-1 version of Win95 into a 50Meg partition. That was a long time ago on a portable with 350Meg disk and it had also an OS/2 partition (god, I loved that operating system). Note to manage this I had to cheat a few things on the W95-installer, because it was always complaining of lack of diskspace. (I don't recall what I did, it's too long ago) I think your 25Meg estimation a bit on the low side but...you *could* be right

    Yes, the swapfile was minuscule...and yes, you didn't want to install anything serious because of the registry inflating so fast. It was in my early days of Windows 95 and I did't want to ditch my beloved (and working) OS/2.

    If I had known of Linux in those days...perhaps...I never would have been forced to move to W95.

  • Re:But who uses SuperDisks? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Who uses SuperDisks?

    Are you familiar with the Itanium project? Intel is shipping IA64 test machines with LS-120 drives. I don't know if all of their future IA64 boxes will use LS-120 drives, but so far every one that I've seen uses them. They simply make sense... They can read/write 1.44MB diskettes in addition to the 120MB disks (as mentioned numerous times already), and the media is cheaper than ZIP disks as far as I can tell (you can mail order them for around $6 each plus shipping). As for speed, the newer LS-120 drives spin at 1440 RPMs, as opposed to the older ones that spun at 720 RPMs.

    Last bennie: they're fscking inexpensive. I paid $49 for my 2x LS-120 drive. That's not much more than the cost of a plain ol' 1.44MB diskette drive.
  • Under win9* you can get a blue screen by ejecting the disk when the machine wants to use it. Linux just ignores the eject button until the drive is unmounted. In fact, with LS-120 drives the eject command works just as it does with CDs. You have to be root though to do this (unlike CDs).
  • Been there, done that, even gave it the same name! It would be interesting to see how it benchmarks vs UMSDOS ~ both methods obviously have a performance penalty with respect to native ext2.

    By the way, the nastier UMSDOS bugs in the 2.2x kernels have been fixed over the last few months:

    http://linux.voyager.hr/umsdos/

    so it's once again a viable option for situations where repartitioning is undesirable (& the flexibility of disk usage is nice). UMSDOS in 2.4-pre-x is still screwed, however.
  • This sort of logic is the same sort of logic that made/makes large numbers of people and businesses run, select, or switch over to Microsoft Windows systems... 'gee, that _fill in your favorite superior computing platform here_ never caught on, why should we bother using it?'

    ...

    There are of course lots of other issues, such as cost of media, installed base...

    You seem (by mentioning Microsoft on Slashdot ;) to be implying that switching to a technology just because it is popular is a flawed decision, but then you admit that it's an "issue".

    The only reason people use floppies is because they're popular. Standards are important when they govern information interchange. Imagine if there were two different and incompatible varieties of audio CD. Or hundreds of different and incompatible varieties of HTML. Hang on, I just remembered something. :p

  • 25 Meg for a full graphical OS and a text editor?

    mulinux [sunsite.auc.dk] fits all that on 2 floppy disks
    (the root one and X addon disk)...
    along with plenty of admin tools, IP-masq, ppp, dialup, a web browser, web server, unix shell tools and some networking tools, nfs root hdcp smb, sound support and a heap more. And you call linux bloated?

    (Well, actually, you can get a very bloated linux if you want, but you do have the choice).

    I've personally got a win95/linux computer happily running ni a 100Mb hdd... 80mb for windows and 20 for linux.
  • Anyone remember the Next cube? Steve Jobs wanted everyone to have their "world" of software on a disk they could pop into any machine - especially useful for students sharing a computer lab. That's why the 600MB mag-optical disk drive from Sony was the centerpiece of the Next Cube.
    - Chris
  • After a flurry of announcements, and even one attempted release, I haven't heard anything more. If I could get one of these 200 Meg floppy drives for $200 I wouldn't think twice. Especially built into a VAIO. All I can say at this point is: what the???

    And when are we going to see an *open* hi capacity floppy standard? Why haven't we seen it already?
    --
  • Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).

    You obviously don't have the same model LS120 that my brother has. Not only is it about 1/4th the speed of a standard floppy drive when reading standard floppies, it's also about 3x louder.

    It's perfectly fast and not particularly loud for reading SuperDisks though.


    OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.org [openverse.org]
  • Really? I swap hard drives all the time. I've got a small collection of 540s and 360s. I use them more than floppies a lot of the time

  • I am totally with you. Few PCs have LS120 SuperDisk drives, and not many more have Zip drives. But CD ROM drives are ubiquitous. Carry a single CD with you, drop it in any PC anywhere, and bam, you're running Linux.
    There's a "bootable business card" Linux [linuxcare.com] which sounds really cool - after all, the only problem with a regular CD is that it's a touch big to carry everywhere, but one the size of a business card can be in your wallet. Unfortunately, Linuxcare does not make them easily available. :-(

    Here's their blurb, for those who are interested:

    The Bootable Business Card is a complete miniature Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM disc in the size and shape of a business card. It is a bootable mini-CD which should work in almost any PC-compatible machine capable of booting CD-ROMs. Boot our Bootable Business Card and you have 108MB of usable software at your fingertips. It contains a full complement of recovery and rescue software. On the booted system are over 500 diagnostic programs, utilities, and networking clients.
  • It might not come with a native boot-to-DOS mode, but here's what I usually do on my NT installs:

    1. Partition the disk so that you have a small FAT partition to hold DOS and a larger partition for NT. I usually use ~100 MB for the FAT partition.

    2. Install DOS (or hell, linux, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, whatever -- I usually use MS-DOS 6.2 myself) onto the 100 MB partition.

    3. Install WinNT on the larger partition. The NT Boot Loader should include three options now -- the regular boot, the VGA boot and MS-DOS.
    This DOS partition comes in handy if you're using NTFS because any important files that you want to get back after a complete NT meltdown can be placed on the DOS partition, which you can boot to even if NT goes beserk. You can also read that partition if you use a DOS boot disk (or Win9x, linux or what have you). Of course, that DOS partition doesn't afford you any NT security, so keep that in mind.

    J
  • For the purpose of clarification, ZipSlack didn't work the way we wanted with an ls120, as it was intended for use with a zipdrive, and it used a umsdos. Quite simply, umsdos SUCKS.. it has a tendancy to break things. Another problem with some of the other solutions I have seen posted here is, writing an image to CD & booting from that is restrictive. It can only be mounted read-only. SuperSlak is a way to boot an EXT2 filesystem from removable media. Booting from removable media was not supposed to be new news, it was supposed to be improved news for those of us who have Superdisks, and wanted an improved alternative.

  • PROOF! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I personaly have a Superdisk drive in my computer. I think it is better than the older 1.44 drives. It takes both forms of media and is substantialy faster. Where did you get this information that it is slower?
    The superdisk format is cross format (mac os/windoze/linux).
  • Actually, for work environments it would be a lot easier (and quicker) to have Win NT's roving desktops. Any computer you log into is customized with all of your stuff. NT's Zero Administration Kit (ZAK) does this very powerfully and for free.

    Don't hate me because I mention M$!!! It's just that they are everywhere in business...

  • Not as Bad as Zip, Though... (Score:3)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @07:45PM (#905790)
    It may be closed, but at least it's affordable. The annoying thing about Zip disks is that they're unaccountably expensive. The drives themselves are coming in at a decent price, *finally*, since you can get a remanufactures ATAPI ZIP unit for $49.95 at CompUSA, but the disks are still way too expensive to be all that useful considering capacity of 100MB (the 250 MB drives and disks are both even more $$$).

    I bought a parallel port unit a few years ago when I got my first computer, an ancient 486DX4/100 laptop. Aside from the 5-pack that came with it, I only ever bought 2 more disks--Fuji brand Zip 2-pack for $25. I finally got a real computer and added a CD burner, and the Zip unit sits atop my computer still, unused for at least a year and a half. The sad part is, until the last few months, Zip drives were still retailing for the same price I bought mine at a couple years ago, and disk prices have come down a bit but not much.

    I'm really not a fan of Iomega: overpriced is their best descriptor. My friends with LS-120 SuperDisk drives actually use them a lot, what with much more affordable media and all, and the drives themselves have been at a great price for a while. Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).

  • LoopSlack (Score:3)

    by ptbrown ( 79745 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @07:54PM (#905791)

    Another way of partitionlessly installing Linux that a few distros (Mandrake and Suse, maybe others) are offering now is to use a loopback filesystem. I've had ZipSlack on my HD for a little bit and have become entirely too fed up with UMSDOS. So, with a little tweaking of the setup scripts, I installed LoopSlack to a 1.2G file. Kent Robotti has put together a prepackaged LoopLinux that is essentially the same thing.

    Loopback-Root-FS-mini-HOWT O [linuxdoc.org]
    LoopLinux [tux.org]
    The easiest distribution to futz around with for stuff like this. [slackware.com]
    And if anyone cares to know what I did (which is a bit of a different approach than Kent took) feel free to ask.

    And yes, this is also essentially what BeOS Personal does.

  • I've done it with Debian. And since the Slashdot gang have a bias for Debian, this should get mod'ed up :)

    The Debian installation program didn't like the name for the device (/dev/hdb?). So I pointed it at a then-blank partition on a hard disk and then switched to another VT, unmounted it (it's mounted somewhere special in /) and mounted the LS-120 there instead. The installation program continued on from there.

    The only tricky part was getting LiLO (or Grub) to boot from the LS-120. I eventually found instructions on the Linux Router project site. See booting 'Higher' Density formatted disks [linuxrouter.org] for info on getting Lilo working. The magic for Lilo was the bios=0x83 (or whatever) parameter. I never got Grub booting it, but it's been a while since I last tried.

    It's no speed daemon [sic], but it's quite OK for a rescue disk. I think the LS-120 is meant to be 2X for normal 1.44M floppies, so it spins faster. And it seeks much faster.

    I use apt-move with my real installation on the hard disk. So every now and then I boot to the floppy and update packages from the HD. nice :)

  • I've got two words: diskless boot.
  • Yes, it is possible. Older SuSE-distributions (up to 6.0? AFAIK not in current distribution) were shipped with a "Live Filesystem" - a bootable CD with a Linux running completely from this CD. No need to have a HDD.

    This is propably no replacement for a real installation, but sometimes (HDD crash, etc.) it can be quite usefull.

    I don't know if there are any ISOs available.
  • dev needs to be writable... /dev/mouse /dev/hd* /dev/audio /dev/dsp /dev/pty* /dev/tty*
  • I'm not trying to sell anything. Here's the known scoop, magnetic media is crap, dead tech, but booting from CD is still more of a 'temp' option then it is perm. Zip's media sucks. I can't stand it, it's flawed, and unreliable. Superdisk 'media' is much more reliable. Even the newer drives are a little bit slower then zip, but it's negligible, and for those of you out there still using a 1x drive, either it still suites your needs, or you deserve what you are getting. 2x drives can be purchased for as low as $40. For the few of you out there flaming this option because you are trying to sell your own alternative, fine, for the rest of you, this is an option. Only an option. ALWAYS do what you feel is best, or most comfortable!
  • I paid $49 for my 2x LS-120 drive. That's not much more than the cost of a plain ol' 1.44MB diskette drive.

    When was the last time you shopped 1.44 disk drives? The Chip Merchant [thechipmerchant.com] will sell you a 1.44 drive for $12US plus shipping.
  • Then, obviously, you can also do it with an IOMEGA Zip 250 disk drive cartridge, or Jaz (have those been discontinued yet?). Or, an ORB... I wish we had an industry standard form of removable small storage without licensor dominance by one company -- oh, yeah, a CD-R 650 to 700 MB disk. (Re)Writers can be purchased for a little more than Zip 100 or SuperDisk, media costs about $.40 cents in spindles of 100, and rewriteable (CD-RW) media is down to a dollar or less in bulk.

    --

  • But it might be useful if you need to be able to bring a Linux distro around with you. You can get a USB LS-120 drive for less than $150, and then you could plug that in to any PC with a USB port, given proper drivers for the PC and for Linux.

    But 8 steps to get to (I presume) a command-line root prompt is too much for folks who want to try out the desktop. A better set-up for these folks would be something like the free BeOS download (BeOS Personal Edition), where it boots from a filesystem-in-a-file on you C:\ drive.

    Another use for this would be for admins that want to switch their users over to Linux: if you've got low-end boxes without CD-ROM drives, or if you don't have a CD-Burner, or don't want to bother with a CD, just create a bootable SuperDisk and use that to fdisk and pull down the tools you need from the network. (Ok, so in most cases, a burned CD would be more useful. Oh well.)

  • Not that there is anything wrong with Slack. It's one of my favorites. But it would be really cool to be able to switch distributions simply by switching removable disks.

    OTOH, I already have LILO entires for RH, SuSE, and Slack. But it's the GEEK FACTOR, damnit!

    --
    "How many six year olds does it take to design software?"

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