3 ms·

I'm disappointed at the lack of a Knoppix mention, myself. First time I tried Knoppix, booting to a desktop from CD without having to install anything with alm

I'm disappointed at the lack of a Knoppix mention, myself. First time I tried Knoppix, booting to a desktop from CD without having to install anything with almost all of my hardware being functional... ...was probably the last time anything I did on a PC actually felt like magic. And we still can't do that with Windows today. It took Microsoft nearly 20 years to even give us a USB installer option. Yeah. It's still magic.

schoen 5y ago
Yeah, the idea of running an operating system without installing it was amazing in the PC world twenty years ago. (This is how DOS and CP/M worked on PCs with no hard drive, in the sense that you would boot them from removable media, but that model didn't seem to outlast the 1990s.) One of the magical experiences I remember with LNX-BBC was when we got Two-Kernel Monte working, which was a tool that let you boot a Linux kernel using a Linux userspace as the bootloader (not emulated or virtualized, but directly on the hardware, replacing the prior kernel and userspace). We had all kinds of fun with that, like netbooting over HTTP. In fact I remember a whole discussion like "hey, PXE is too restrictive, we can ship 50 MB of code that does an arbitrary netboot using non-BIOS-included drivers, protocols, and authentication logic". I think someone did make a custom image to do this in some environment. One thing I didn't know until I checked just now is that the Two-Kernel Monte replacement kexec is still maintained in the kernel! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec Somehow I thought it had fallen by the wayside after a couple of years, but apparently not. So now I should go try some netbooting over HTTPS... :-)
- deivid 5y ago
  take a look at https://netboot.xyz/ https://netboot.xyz/

3 ms·

I'm disappointed at the lack of a Knoppix mention, myself. First time I tried Knoppix, booting to a desktop from CD without having to install anything with alm

by techrat 5y ago

schoen 5y ago
Yeah, the idea of running an operating system without installing it was amazing in the PC world twenty years ago. (This is how DOS and CP/M worked on PCs with no hard drive, in the sense that you would boot them from removable media, but that model didn't seem to outlast the 1990s.) One of the magical experiences I remember with LNX-BBC was when we got Two-Kernel Monte working, which was a tool that let you boot a Linux kernel using a Linux userspace as the bootloader (not emulated or virtualized, but directly on the hardware, replacing the prior kernel and userspace). We had all kinds of fun with that, like netbooting over HTTP. In fact I remember a whole discussion like "hey, PXE is too restrictive, we can ship 50 MB of code that does an arbitrary netboot using non-BIOS-included drivers, protocols, and authentication logic". I think someone did make a custom image to do this in some environment. One thing I didn't know until I checked just now is that the Two-Kernel Monte replacement kexec is still maintained in the kernel! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec Somehow I thought it had fallen by the wayside after a couple of years, but apparently not. So now I should go try some netbooting over HTTPS... :-)
- deivid 5y ago
  take a look at https://netboot.xyz/ https://netboot.xyz/