On 10/4/05, Bill Kendrick wrote:

Lance wrote:

* A spare hard drive
* A reliable partition manager (instead of a drive) * Perhaps an alternate computer entirely

Just to be a weenie, I'll mention live CDs like Knoppix.

There'll be a DVD version too, at one point...

Or even USB-bootable systems. (I got to play with one of those this past weekend at a friend's workplace. Full desktop Linux system stuck in a bootable 1GB USB memory stick. Sweet!)

Just to note, live systems on optical media won't preserve data between reboots without storing it somewhere, e.g. on a file or partition (Knoppix does this with some scripts somewhere IIRC). I don't know about USB systems.

They're fun to play with, of course, but doing serious work is usually easiest with a perminant install; you only need ~1-3 GB to get the base and GIMP running (I'd suggest more if you're going to do major work in it). Note that NTFS support in linux is patchy at best, although FAT is supported pretty well. (So if you're moving files, you may want a small FAT partition to move stuff in between Lin/Win.)

-- ~Mike
- Just my two cents
- No man is an island, and no man is unable.