[TLUG-ANNOUNCE]: TLUG - Tue Dec 14, 7:30pm

[Colin McGregor]

"William Park" <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> on Wednesday, December 15, 2004 11:07
PM wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 07:15:37AM -0500, Colin McGregor wrote:
> > Knoppix's great strength is in temporary/short term solutions to
> > problems.  Yes, Knoppix does support saving information to USB memory
> > keys, and/or hard drives, but not without a (little) bit of jumping
> > through hoops. My inclination would be in a case like yours to go with
> > a more conventional install, be it Fedora, Debian, Suse, or ..... then
> > for updates just use the conventional package management tools (read
> > the likes of apt-get can be your friend...).
>
> Did the computers you were given for the Internet Longe had harddisks?

I didn't check, certainly most of the machines had hard drives, maybe all of
them. Keep in mind that hard drives were irrelevant for my purposes, so I
didn't pay much attention.

> If so, why didn't you install Debian using a shell script?  This way,
> just insert CD, boot, run the script.

Yes, I could have installed to the hard drives, but it would have caused
more trouble than it was worth. At 3:00 AM when I was attempting to get the
6 hours sleep per day required of all the volunteers I did NOT want a phone
call from the volunteer (who may never have seen a Linux box before in his
or her life) that was keeping an eye on the lounge asking about fsck errors.
That is the joy of this solution, any problems with the box you can tell
people that in the event of trouble just power cycle the box, no need to do
a shut-down sequence, just power cycle. Further of course, by default with
Knoppix passwords are disabled, so the box comes up logged in as user
"knoppix", install to the hard drive and you have to start worrying about
passwords. With Debian I would have lost Knoppix's default great
auto-detection of hardware (remember that I didn't know until 6 days before
the convention that all of the hardware I was getting would be almost
identical, I could have found myself in a situation where I had 26 machines,
all from different vendors with 26 different monitors which would have made
making an auto install script painfully hard to write)...

No, in this case, which is admittedly in many ways NOT normal, the hard
drive install would be much more trouble than it was worth.

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