I've been playing with Linux for the last few days. I thought it would be a good educational experience, which it has been - plus it was fun.
So far I've tried two distributions - DSL (damn small Linux) and Knoppix. These are both intended to be run live - that is they are not installed on your hard drive.
DSL is less than 50 Mb. The version of Knoppix that I downloaded is about 700 Mb. Either one of these systems could be used from a USB flash drive but it's easier in many instances to just boot off a CD - so that's what I've been doing.
I'm using an old Fujitsu laptop with a Netgear PCMCIA wireless card, Knoppix, and Iceweasel to access my blog tonight. It's working fine.
Iceweasel is the equivalent of Firefox for the Debian version of Linux. Knoppix is based on Debian which is why it has the Iceweasel browser. There was some sort of disagreement between Mozilla and the developers of Debian which led to the creation of Iceweasel. DSL has Firefox included. If you take a short dip in the Linux pool this starts to make sense. There are a zillion terms, words and acronyms that are part of the vocabulary of people who are interested in this sort of thing which I imagine is part of the appeal.
I titled this blog Iceweasel because it sounds funny to me.
I can see that having an operating system that runs off a CD or a USB flash drive could come in very handy when a computer crashes, if you want to try Linux before installing it or if you want to learn more about Linux/Unix and computers/coding in general.
I'd highly recommend giving DSL or Knoppix a test drive - I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
