Re: [school-discuss] Linux Distro Launching From MS Windows

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 01:10:09PM -0700, Joel Kahn wrote:
> I'm looking for a fairly recent but *STABLE* distro that can
> be installed as a file/directory in a Microsoft Windows XP Pro
> system and then booted using a CD-ROM, DVD, or other
> removable media. I want to make sure that my current MS-Win
> setup doesn't get messed up; unfortunately, it's still required.

One friend of mine had to use Windows at work, so he used coLinux
to run Linux as a sort of a Windows app.  See http://colinux.org

> The distro needs to run with *high* reliability and reasonable
> speed on a 2.6Ghz Celeron and 384 MB of available system RAM.

I might ask our Antique folks what they'd recommend (though it's
rather a Russian distro but works on 64M OK) if you're not
satisfied with the proposed solutions (including Tiny Core Linux
maybe).

But overall, it's a severely crapped machine: adding a gig of
memory off ebay instead of that 128M stick might help immensely,
and even replacing it with 512/256M one should help to actually
use that CPU and not hear that HDD swapping.

Just in case, I have an unused PC133 gigabyte stick in my older
Thinkpad T41 and an unused DDR1 gigabyte stick in T43 (both of
those were equipped with 1.5Gb RAM soon upon me getting hold of
them; "unused" means I use X60 with 2x2GB by now); if someone's
traveling to Ukraine or some of my friends travels to the US I
could probably pass one (I'm afraid mail might just lose it,
or the transfer being more expensive than the thing).

> It should also support scanning and printing with a Kodak ESP-3
> multi-function.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsdriverkodak/ it seems.

> In addition, I have an old Iomega 100MB Zip drive attached.

LPT?

> Maybe setting this up would be good experience for some
> hot-shot high school geek, but please do *lots* of debugging
> before you tell me its ready. Thanks in advance for any help.

I've worked with IDE one, and IIRC LPT ones were supported either
(still they were *very* slow despite of LPT-SCSI adapter inside).

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/