dare2dreamer
Group: Members
Posts: 113
Joined: Feb. 2005 |
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Posted: June 14 2006,07:32 |
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DSL is one of those "swiss army chainsaws" that I always keep in my geek kit. Because it is system light and handles older hardware well, it's my disc of choice to toss into mystery-meat pc's to determine what I'm dealing with.
Beyond its use as a rescue and diagnostic tool, I've used DSL:
1. As a portable desktop on my usb thumbdrive, and as a cd. I've been 100% linux long enough that I actually get a little lost on other OS'es. Having copy that runs via QEMU/vmware/etc has been mighty handy when I was forced to go portable without my laptop.
2. I've now ressurected three laptops, all old enough to be considered relics. One of which is so reliable that it lives in the living room, with uptimes in the months. Coupled with a wifi card, it's my xterm of choice when I need to do something quickly, and it's often the pc that goes on "hazmat" duty when someone begs me to unscramble their network.
Someone needs to explain to me why older laptops have such wonderful keyboards. It really is why I can't let the "nine pound beast" go to the scrapheap.
3. My girlfriend's pc.
After a brief stint of laptop obsession, my girlfriend decided she wanted a pc on her desk again. Rather than blowing the budget on another loud, expensive machine for the office, I got the idea to set up a thin client.
Once again, DSL to the rescue. I found an old HP E-Vectra at a computer show for fourty bucks, frugally installed DSL and the NXclient extension and managed to materialize a decent monitor from the spares closet.
With a little tinkering, we now have a machine that securely logs into our main desktop machine, and as a bonus it does double duty as a guest machine when we kill off the nxclient.
Let's see, forensics, rescue, portable pc, three laptops, and a thinclient/guest machine. Not bad for fifty megabytes of penguin power.
-------------- ----dare2dreamer.
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