Wed, 16 Jun 2004

Boot a 1gb iso image directly from a windoze partition

A few people were surprised to see the most recent Quantian come in at 1.1gb, which does of course exceed the size of a cdrom. There are few good reason for this (such as the large and growing number of good packages to include, the fact that software tends to grow rather than shrink, and that we like documnentation too), and it is unlikely to change.

So burning dvds is a good idea, as is running directly from a linux partition as outlined in the lilo booting HOWTO. That said, there are of course always a few machines which simply cannot be turned into dual-boot or linux-only. For these, we have a very nice new solution: just drop the iso image onto c:/ as, say, quantian.iso, and then all one needs is a boot cdrom (such as the current clusterKnoppix cdrom from which Quantian is derived), and then use

   knoppix bootfrom=/dev/hda1/quantian.iso

at the prompt.

Clean, simple, easy. Doesn't cause heatburn or pimples, and worked on my trusted Thinkpad T23, a machine from work which knows only win2k. The full writeup is now up in the new windows booting HOWTO.

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Pre-made dvds of 0.5.9.1 and cdroms of 0.5 available

Mark Walker wrote in to say that BudgetLinuxCDs.com now has both dvds of Quantian 0.5.9.1 for $7.50 as well as cds of 0.5 (aka 0.4.9.6, the final 0.4.* release) for $2.50, with worldwide shipping support starting from $0.25. Kudos goes to Ed Pegg for setting this up.

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