Thu, 16 Feb 2006 06:44:31 -0800, ballpointpenguin@everestkc.net wrote:

These are likely to sound like silly questions, so please pause a
moment whilst I don my asbestos long-johns thanks. I also tried
submitting them to a local Linux user group, and as far as I can tell,
it was consigned to oblivion, so I'll try a somewhat larger audience.

I have a relatively old IBM ThinkPad - I think about 600 MHz speed -
which has been pretty much relegated to providing wireless access to
our stereo system. Windows XP Pro has been great about providing
support for the PCMCIA card that gives USB 2.0 slots, as well as the
external hard drive and the EdiMax wireless connector (basically a
ZYDas-based chipset) that are plugged into the PCMCIA card.
--
Now, I'm interested in using Linux in place of Windows XP - all I'm
doing with it is playing music, hosting music files for other computers
in the home network, and some limited web browsing (weather.com and
Shoutcast sites). I can see without too much trouble setting up a Linux
partition for dual-booting, and limiting just what is getting put onto
the laptop.
--
Here are my questions:
--
1) How can I find a Live-CD linux distro that will support the hardware
I mentioned above?

You should download a promising candidate for actual testing. You won't
know until you try. AFAIK, Slax and Knoppix are the leaders in LiveCDs.

2) If I can't find one, how would I go about building such a Live-CD?

It's not too hard, actually. You need to have a clear understanding of
boot loaders, kernels, and root filesystems. I did several step by step
newsgroup postings which detailed my progress along the way. My project
is posted here: http://www.xmission.com/~ddmayne2/10.2-live

The project was announced here:

You can trace some of the links I referenced to see how the project
evolved. The first version was short and sweet:

The complexity comes in accepting input from the user. Also, Slax and
Knoppix try to identify all of the hardware to make the user's experience
as painless as possible. My project takes the opposite approach by
assuming that the user knows which kernel modules and device names
he intends to use.

The reason that I'm asking these questions is because I could see a
potential opportunity for people to be able to use such a Live-CD on
their old laptops as an answer to Windows Media Center, crummy sound
cards notwithstanding. As a last resort, I can burn an IS of an
existing distro so that my laptop's poor little 4x CD-RM will be able
to read it, and just bite the bullet and dual-boot.
--
Thanks for the information!
--
John Gardner

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