Knoppix, a Linux live CD, will boot a computer from the optical drive and give a slow but usable graphical user interface. The most recent version comes with Firefox and OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta, so if you’re already using the Windows equivalent, Knoppix is that much easier to pick up. This still leaves the question, what can be done on a computer without a hard drive?
Looks like it was heisted from the distrowatch Knoppix description page.
Useless to you perhaps. Not so to me. *shoo* Go away.
yes they are
no they’re not
I agree, the speed decrease with a CD based distro is… eww
but I know they are useful for demos and recovering files so they aren’t all bad.
But as far as using that as your computing environment, HD > * unless you are talking like iPod booting or something.
the speed decrease with a CD based distro is… eww
Actually you have the option of using RAM or swap or even the /tmp directory of a preexisting distro as your root device. The slowness comes from mounting the cdrom as the root filesystem. But with enough RAM, aside from the boot time, a CD based distro could potentially be very useful.
yes they are
Ever heard of a thin client?
I don’t think knoppix was really meant for computers without harddisks in the first place.But more for doing forensics and repair work.Knoppix is a very usefull tool.I cloned several windows HD’s with ntfsclone and repaired multiple fu*ked up bootloader configs.
> I don’t think knoppix was really meant for
> computers without harddisks in the first place.But
> more for doing forensics and repair work.
No, AFAIK the primary purpose of Knoppix was to allow showing off Linux and related software without having to install it first (and with no risk to the already installed OS). But rescue and repair came pretty soon after that (once the great hardware detection showed it was workable).
So I can play around on the internet. That seems to be the entire “list” of things summed up.
While that may be exceptionally handy to some, I have to admit it seems a bit lacking from my point of view. Perhaps someone could come up with some more examples of useful things you can do.
Oh, and I’d like to make a request that no one come up with “Show off Linux!” as something it is useful for.
> Perhaps someone could come up with some more
> examples of useful things you can do.
I used it on my sister’s computer that had only WinXP installed. That way (and using the feature that allows you to save config and user data to a floppy) I could use a familiar environment, my konqueror bookmarks, …. All that without having to mess with my sister’s hard disk.
Nowadays I’d save to a USB stick, of course.
> Oh, and I’d like to make a request that no one come
> up with “Show off Linux!” as something it is useful
> for.
Well, that was the original purpose (for the Linuxtag conference). It has evolved into other areas since…
While that may be exceptionally handy to some, I have to admit it seems a bit lacking from my point of view. Perhaps someone could come up with some more examples of useful things you can do.
We run labs of 30 computers in 40 elementary schools, without using any harddrives in the computers. How?
There’s 1 skookum server (dual-P3 1 GHz or dual-AthlonMP 2200+ with 4 GB RAM) that acts as a terminal server for the client computers (P2 266 to P3 600 w/64-256 MB RAM). The servers run Debian Linux, the clients run Debian Linux using diskless, remote booting. The client computers boot to a stripped down ICEwm with a Windows theme. And the kids have access to OpenOffice, Ten Thumbs, Firefox, Konqueror, and various educational games. Works like a charm.
A similar setup can be used for kiosks in hotels, restaurants, airports, or cafes.
Just because there’s no harddrive does not mean you have to boot/run off a CD.
>Just because there’s no harddrive does not mean you have to boot/run off a CD.
That is true, althought the article focuses on that. I guess that is really what I’m curious about. The CD versions.
I’ve been in labs like the ones you speak of. The major difference is that users there can save to a drive *somewhere* even though it is not in a box sitting in front of them.
I do think the concept is neat, and I’ve thought about setting myself up with one (CD distro), but I just can’t justify the time at this point.
Considering that’s how Google runs much of their server computers. No they are not. Throw in a few gigs of RAM to run off of and you have a very fast computer to quickly cache and sort through tons of info….requires quite a large server farm though 😉
Off Topic:
My main pc is a diskless thin client. Can you say “QUIET”? So, yes, diskless is usefull.
All the noisy stuff is in the basement.
The loudest thing up here is our keyboards.
Having owned an Amiga 4000 with 128mb ram and only ever using 30-40mb multitasking apps (no HD swapping), I’m sure more can be done with OS’s without the need for HDs.
Given todays machines are very fast and have 128mb as a minimum amount of ram, a nice portable OS which was very fast and ram efficient (saving settings in a thumb drive) would be great 🙂
It can be done 🙂
http://damnsmalllinux.org/
DSL can be entirely loaded into ram from USB, CD etc (given 128mb or more) and runs like the wind. No HD required.
Davy
DSL is actually pretty darn slow and non-functional as well. Puppy Linux and Austrumi are much better at running directly from RAM and having useful applications (Abiword, Gnumeric, Opera, etc.) to boot.
A comment on Slashdot can be found here http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158670&cid=13291431
and the original arcticle can be found here http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/11/009225&tid=217&tid=2…
I’d have almost everything I needed in an HD-less computer if I could just save firefox bookmarks to a network server.
(is there a way?)
-b
if I could just save firefox bookmarks to a network server.
(is there a way?)
You could add:
// Specify which bookmarks file to use:
user_pref(“browser.bookmarks.file”, “<bookmarks_file>”);
To your user.js file, where <bookmarks_file> points to where you want to save your bookmarks, which could be on a mounted network drive. An alternative way of adding the preference is to go into about:config right-click select New->String enter “browser.bookmarks.file” for ther preference name and the location of the file as the value. Note that if you use this to share bookmarks between multiple instances of firefox on different computers, it won’t work very well as it only reads the file when it is opened and only writes to it when it is closed which can result in cahnages made by one instance being overwritten by another instance.
I just use sitebar (sitebar.org) it can import firefox bookmarks. It does require that you have access to webspace with PHP and MySQL though.
I’m one of the developers of http://maple.nu/ which is an online bookmark manager, currently you need an firefox extension to save and retrieve your bookmarks, but we are working on and testing a web interface that should be ready soon so no plugins etc needed.
Maybe this is something you could try http://maple.nu/
click Bookmarks>manage bookmarks>export>save it to your favorite floppy, USBstick, or, even, email it to your favorite yahoo or gmail account!
Many of us have thin client terminals and let our house server do the storage!
I’m looking forward to no hard drive based systems, well no hard drive in the traditional sense. IBM has been working on the “Soul Drive”. An idea that is basically summed up as having some form of removable media that has OS/Applications/Personal Data that can auto detect hardware on various forms of pcs. As of right now, I know they are using Knoppix
. I wouldn’t mind having one server (with huge amounts of HDs) + many “terminals” in my house that are using some sort of Soul Drive. Keep the essentials on Soul Drive, move stuff on and off with the server.
http://news.com.com/IBM+brains+capture+a+PCs+soul/2100-1041_3-58308…
as far as security goes…. can’t beat it, if there is no hard drive there are no files to corrupt
save your settings and personal documents/pics/etc, to a usb jump drive and even if somebody does crack your system….. who cares…. reboot and start fresh. Good for using other peoples comps to.
I keep a couple live cd’s with me all the time, it comes in handy for troubleshooting a system or just surfing the net in a secure way… many even come with an office suite.
> save your settings and personal documents/pics/etc,
> to a usb jump drive and even if somebody does crack
> your system….. who cares…. reboot and start
> fresh. Good for using other peoples comps to.
Yeah, either that, or if you happen to have access to a remote machine offering ssh access you can comfortably put your files there, even with drag’n’drop (use the fish protocol in konqueror, fish://username@host/path/to/your/diskspace/ ).
NB: If someone cracks the system it’s your personal data that’s at risk. Nothing to take lightly, IMHO.
Morphix is another that can be entirely loaded into RAM. You can also get around the storage issue with a netfs and a flash drive to store configs. If you don’t reboot often, it’s not much of an issue to copy the contents of a flash drive over to /etc every time.
Or you could just build your own CD, there are some tools out there that make it pretty damned easy.
But then, I don’t use live CD’s for anything but repair, and rarely at that.
What I am working on, which is in line with the diskless system but not quite in the same way as live CD’s, is a network of media oriented home brewed thin clients booting from a central server, and mounting audio and video from that same server’s RAID array. I guess they’re probably not quite thin clients in the traditional sense, but something similar, and definitely an area where being diskless is a big deal. Not only will it solve a large deal of the physical noise problem, but also cut down on interference for the sound card.
A hard-drive less PC is useless to the average joe user. No one will wait for KNOPPIX to load off a CD, load their settings from floppy or flash drive or limit themselves to what is already loaded on the CD/DVD in terms of apps.
Hard-drive-less PCs are useful to people who want to cluster them. Cluster a few HD-less PCs with a PC that has an HD and the ability to take advantage of that extra HW-power and you’ve got yourself some pretty good processing power to do all your number crunching.
A hard-drive less PC is useless to the average joe user.
Computers don’t have to be PCs, they can be media center appliances, gateways, routers, servers, clusters, etc. Not all of those applications require a harddrive. If a PXE boot server is available on your ‘net you could save some money and have more appliances by skimping on harddrives and other accessories where they’re not needed.
You don’t have to spend $2000 on a media center PC. You could build your own for less than $300 today. Some average users might like to save $1700 and have access to the same features you enjoy on your Dell.
gobolinux is interesting in this regard. it originated from system to enable people to install programs inside their home directory, or rootless.
this was then extended to the full distro we see today. but one can still use the rootless idea to install user software on a removable media so that when its reinserted one can access them.
and why would they not want to boot from a cd. they allready do so with consoles. basicly you take your avarage console, insert a desktop linux livecd, plug in a keyboard, a mouse and the users storage media and presto. i dont see how a user would object to this at all.
it may look like a step backwards to the age of the early mac and the amiga. but people didnt complain then and i fail to see how they will do so today. a external hdd or usb key is just a supercharged floppy in many ways. and with the added flexibility of the livecd you can have your desktop where ever you want to
Most users do the following: Internet, Music, office, graphics. Most users are not technical users. An NAS device for central storage for multiple computer (or one’s MP3 collection <grin> would be plenty). Knoppix is great for these tasks, as is DSL and other distros. If you absolutely must have Windows, W98 can be bent to a live CD mode. By doing this with *any* OS and apps, the CD is new at each boot – no corruption is permanent. One can do without NAS by buying a DVD-DL drive for storage of data. It works. I use it all the time.
Yep. That is why IBM is pushing forward with Soul Drive as my last post said.
Computers in future will be hd-less. They’ll have a slot you insert your holographic disk that you can also take with you for security reasons. It’ll be faster than dvd/hd, light, portable and indestructible. The only reason we have hd now is for speed and storage size. Back in 80’s, oses/langs. were in rom and we used floppies for programs. We can put oses into eeprom so they can be patched up and replace floppy with holo-memory.
I think the best live CDs are SLAX and Kanotix, and FreeSBIe as a close second. However, the latter has a completely differentphilosophy behind it, with a much simpler desktop (no KDE, just fluxbox or xfce). Still, it’s impressive what a functional desktop you get.
Knoppix is very good, too.
There are a fev Live CDs based on Linux that are crappy (with several bugs in there, and/or VERY slow booting).
The background image in 3.9 is enough to make me vomit.
Now the fact that KDE is on top of it… no thank you.
The parent article seems rather tepid and mostly for dullards who have never heard of a USB drive or any of the small Linux systems that run on USB drives.
I use computers without a hard drive quite a bit, couple recycled virgin web players, flash only wireless web pad. They control my x10 devices, stream mp3s and do my shopping. Oh and of course my pda. Think fanless pc with no moving parts and they make a lot of sense.
Book 8, Chapter 2:
“every such device has another level of play”
http://fullsack.com/tao/wisdom/book8.xml
Old (and new also) computers without harddisks can be used as thin clients with cool projects like LTSP or Thinstation.
HDs are unreliable and cost money.
Computers without harddisks, it’s been done: we called it the eighties.
Thinclients always have been a bad idea, all you’re doing is adding a single point of failure (the network) to save a few bucks.
The security argument is bogus too. Just use a BSD variant and set the immutable flag on your system files (mounting key filesystems read-only is helpfull too), virusses and hackers don’t stand a chance.
Oh and the guy who took out his hd to reduse the noise seriously has to buy a mac. (this sounds like a troll I know, but it was my solution to the same problem and it works for me)
In conclusion, computers without hd aren’t useless but really a step back. Live cds are great in fringe situations, but for the rest of us why bother ?
If the fans are so loud in your mac that you can’t hear the hard drive over them, and you think that’s a solution, more power to you, man.
I’m sorry, it’s not a step back when you consider you’re just loading the OS into a faster, quieter, and cooler ram disk and storing your data centrally, and thus much more efficiently.
Back in my W98 days, I downloaded and installed Gozilla and damn near completely bork’d my computer. I didn’t have time to do a wipe and reinstall, I needed to find a quick fixit so I could get back on line long enough to upload some files and limp along until Saturday.
Enter my 486 laptop, serial modem, and the QNX trial floppy I had downloaded about a month ago. Barebones would not begin to describe the desktop, but “wicked fast” would.
Got me online and I found out what I needed to know to fix my main system.
—
If I had children and wanted to set up a computer so they couldn’t get it full of kruftware and eatup my bandwidth with bittorrent, I’d try something like DSL as a solution.
Not really useless when I can just save all my work on my little handy 512 mb USB key.
Have anyone here considered RISC OS?
This OS is located in ROM or FlashROM since 1987 and is about 4MB in size. It is a fairly complete OS specifically written for the ARM architecture and was designed by the same people who designed the ARM architecture. It can be run entirely without HD (or any discdrive). It boots up (and shuts down) in seconds. It needs very little RAM. It is very advanced in the UI department, in fact one can argue it is ahead (and has been for a decade) of certain well-known mainstream OS’s. It is very fast in operation. It is actively developed and used in many different area’s. Following links can provide more detailed info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS – general overview
http://www.iyonix.com/ – current flagship computer
http://www.drobe.co.uk/ – news on RISC OS and related stuff
http://www.thea9.info/ – interesting ARM9 based fan-less mini desktop
I have a program which absolutely must run once each week without fail. This program is backed up on my ISP’s server. In the event of a HD crash on my main computer, I can boot from a Knoppix or Mepis live CD on any computer with a CD-ROM drive, start Telnet and run my program just as pretty as you please. I can then open a browser and do what I need to do on line. I also have a dial-up Internet connection in case of DSL failure.
Computers without harddrives make excellent thin clients. LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) even makes it dead easy – http://ltsp.org/
gobolinux is interesting in this regard. it originated from system to enable people to install programs inside their home directory, or rootless.
That’s trivial and not solely gobo-linux related.Dpends on the discretionally access rights.
i know that, but the current gobolinux packaging system allows for rootless installs with the same packages. still, the rootless framework on their page is a bit rusty
hmm btw, isnt autopackage supposed to give the user the option to install in their home dir?
autopackage + live cd + external drive, problem solved
I think people may be confused about what a thin client is — it is not a machine w/o a hard drive, it is a machine w/o a hard drive *on board.* IMO, a thin client has almost no application in the home but makes a lot of sense for campuses, etc. My reason for saying it has no application in the home is that most people cannot handle running their own network, let alone the kind of complex network required for having a thin client. Maybe once zeroconf becomes a commonplace reality (50 years?), and broadband is the norm worldwide (maybe never?) things like remote storage and thin clients will make sense fot aunt Tilly and her ilk. Until then, give them a Dell (or better yet, a Mac Mini).
Phlak and Helix kick ass.
I can see where thin clients could dramatically reduce the need for systems administration.
That would save a lot of companies a *lot* of money, but probably kill msft.
Just the humble opinion of a long time systems administrator.
Knoppix is wonderful, but slow as an arthritic snail on a ball and chain when run from the CD.
Puppy Linux is the only Linux live-CD I know of that is fast enough to use continually without frustration. If you have 128 MB or more of RAM, Puppy will load entirely into RAM at boot-up, and since there is no need for slow reads from the CD after that, it just blazes on all but very old, very slow, hardware.
Current versions of Puppy are available with Firefox as well as other lighter-weight web browsers.
-Gnobuddy
“Puppy Linux is the only Linux live-CD I know of that is fast enough to use continually without frustration.”
Try Slax. It’s brilliant, faster than Knoppix when run from CD and way way faster when loaded into RAM.
Plus it’s a brilliantly clean setup.
This whole debate seems kindof pointless to me. HDDless PCs have their place; which isn’t everywhere, but where they are useful they are useful and where they’re not, they’re not? Simple surely?
they’re useless if you value your information. I would never voluntarily save personal documents online that I cared about. Granted, some documents you have no control over, but as I said, voluntarily I wouldn’t put them out there.
they’re useless if you value your information. I would never voluntarily save personal documents online that I cared about. Granted, some documents you have no control over, but as I said, voluntarily I wouldn’t put them out there.
Welcome to the 2000’s. During this time frame we have many wonderful kinds of technology including external harddrives, flash storage and burnable CD’s. No, silly, I don’t mean CDs you light on fire, I mean ones that you write information onto. There are also these wonderful file sharing protocols that allow you to back up stuff to cheap pcs that you can pick up for like $200…..wait a minute….we’ve had that for years and years. What timeframe are you from again?
Reading this article got me thinking, so I took an old Pentium MMX, ripped the HD out of it, and, after fussing with NFS, am now using it as a thin client for guests to use. It runs a hell of a lot faster than it did when running its own OS from a harddrive.
I was also just really bored 😛
Apple has had a feature in OS X for a while that allows computers to boot into a full version of Mac OS X from the network (over NFS or HTTP). In fact, you could do this all the way back to OS 9, but with OS X 10.3, you can do it in a “diskless” mode. This means you can buy a bunch of Mac Minis, get an OS X server, and use them in your office or school without worrying about even imaging them. If the software on one messes up, just reboot it! Home directories for users files are also stored on a server so there really is no data being stored on a hard disk.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/netbootnetworkinstall.h…
I use an old computer with no hard drives as a firewall. I put Dachstein LEAF firewall on a floppy disk and boot from it to run a firewall and DHCP for NAT.
If someone cracks the firewall, there’s precious little software or resources available to launch an attack against my internal network.