Cooler than a sonic screwdriver

One of these....

http://www.waferdrive.co.uk/

In me wallet, with a slightly hacked knoppix linux boot cd image on it.

Means I can boot any modern PC (new enough to boot from USB) into a pretty usable and rather slick Linux. It does full hardware detection and support, essentially doing the same job as a 1hr windows install (with better results) in about 40seconds each boot although it obviously does not support bizarre or non-standard devices, and cannot provide 3d acceleration support on Nvidia and ATI cards because knoppix cannot legally distribute the drivers.

Mind you, I have a 300mb writable /home partition on there as well, I could easily add drivers, but I'll probable stuff it with extra programs and media codecs (again, not legally distributable) to get full avi and dvd-menu support.

I'm just SO chuffed with it, and even more chuffed witht the looks on ppl's faces when they see their machine boot from something the size of 2 phone sims and run better and faster than they ever seen it (and that is even WITH the slow speed of flash memory).

You could also, as I plan to do, stuff a 2GB one with NO vids and mp3's,a true portable media library you can use on any machine without having to interface to an ipod or anything.

Trying to interpret what you are saying but are you carrying round one of those gadgets just in case a Linux thingy'd PC crashes so that you can reboot it? Why?

LOL, not quite. The waferdrive holds a full desktop OS, browser, email, office software, multimedia, the works. ANY modern-ish PC can start and run just from that teeny slip of plastic.

Why? Well cos it means I can always avoid windows when I'm in a bad mood and far from my own desktop or laptop, it may well save someone else's PC getting kicked to ribbons. :D

But a far more useful reason is this.....

Mate calls me up...."PC's fucked, won't start"...I can boot it from the flash key, and if everything behaves right using that.....his hardware's fine and his windows is fucked, and conversely if the linux boot goes terribly tits-up, it's a fair bet he's got sick hardware.

It's also amazingly handy as a backup and recovery tool. It's a bitch to back up a running windows system, and free and usable windows tools for that are pretty thin on the ground. Boot from the wafer, and (assuming you have 2 disk partitions), a quick

dd if=/dev/hda1 |gzip>/mnt/backups/winback.gz And you're all backed up, BULLET-PROOFED. (where /mnt/backups is where the second disk partition is.....no sense getting into it, but briefly, in unix, instead of partitions getting letters like C: D: E: etc, they are just attached wherever you like in the filesystem....as if c:\program files when double clicked on, opened what you would now call D: but behaved exactly the way it does now....it's handy as hell for managing disk space.....oh look I've run out of space in /usr/games....I'll just tack on a 4GB partition on some other drive and move the current contents there, and the system will never know)

Virtually the same command with a few tweaks restores your backup. If you have 2 physical drives, you can archive one whole drive, partition table and all, to the other, and gzip will get it to about 40% of actual size for you.

Sorry I'm raving.

Better answer.....

DVD's and avi's look better in Linux, there is NO reason for this, but I am yet to meet a friend who, if they haven't commented on it themselves, have when asked, confirmed that there is something "nicer" about video playback. AND, although some folk are alergic to typing, I find "mplayer -fs neworder.avi" a shitload quicker than battling wmp10....of course clicking on stuff in linux works too, I just prefer the typing.

Now I'm evangelising. I'll do some useful work in windows as pennance.

JT, I don't think you asking Why? helped much there, did it

LOL

download the cd version from knoppix.org, burn it, reboot, enjoy, it's quite safe[1] and NO unix/linux/geeky knowledge required beyond knowing which key to press when your pc starts in order to bring up the boot menu. It'll probably do everything you PC does now, for free.

Then imagine the same thing held on the teeniest flash drive you ever seen.

[1] it does show your windows hard drives on the desktop, but you need to consciously log in as root and then consciously set about wiping them to do any harm :D

I think rhetorical is probably absent from the Norn Irish dictionary. What gets me is Steves 7 paragraphs in before he realsises he's on one again.

shoulda just stuck the pic up shouldn't I :D

EDIT:

Full OS's aside, think of the potential of 2GB in such a tiny package, you can get 6 of them in a single card pouch in a wallet. Bloody hell, if they were any cheaper (£5 for 1GB and £10 for 2GB) you could use them as multimedia business cards ( That's a pint Tim owe's me if he uses them for his label,). In the ugly world of windows, you plug them in, a new Hard disk letter apears, you use it as normal, you unplug it, no biggie.

it deffo looks interesting. i've been looking for some sort of external drive thingy to back up etc.

Jeffari-al-Texani wrote: So Cambo...just what the fuck am I supposed to do with it???

well aside from my idea of a full spec PC OS on something the area of a guitar pick.....You can do anything with it that you can do with a real hard drive. I will be filling one with all NO albums and a fre choice vids....never again will anyone ask "who are New Order" and remain unpunished.

But for me, the sight of a huge gamer's PC starting with THAT as it's only "disc" and the sheer speed of the bugger on USB2 machines, is just geek porn.

Told you, as far as the wonder boot system goes....try the CD, what's 650MB of broadband and a blank CD cost you? it's a neat party trick at least, and might just bail your sick as fuck PC out one day. Did I mention it comes with an art package that can do everything photoshop and most of it's 3rd party addons can? :D

NOOLigan wrote: it deffo looks interesting. i've been looking for some sort of external drive thingy to back up etc.

well in standard windows trim it'll do fine as a place to keep documents, especially those you want with you. But it'll be impractical as a system backer upper. That knoppix boot thing does indeed give you the same powers as the likes of Ghost or TrueImage, but you're still gonna need a big chunk of HD real estate to back a 40GB C: drive up to ;)