[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Sat, 2008-02-02 at 16:16 +0000, David Bell wrote: > On Saturday 02 February 2008 15:52, Benjamin M. A'Lee wrote: > > On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 02:42:55PM -0000, Charlie BT wrote: > > > > It's not a case of Microsoft doing something perfectly reasonable and > > people complaining about it, though; it's a case of them designing an > > over-complicated box, which doesn't have any immediately-obvious way of > > opening. > > > > What's wrong with a normal cardboard box - with security seals and > > shrinkwrap if they're really necessary. If nothing else, the Vista box > > is wasteful. > > Agreed. Have a look at the Mac OSX Leopard packaging. Simple, efficient and > pleasing to the eye. Or the Debian/Ubuntu packaging - a simple cardboard sleeve, if that. I like the Mandriva USB key distro. It's been possible for a while but it just takes a little extra development to make it truly usable and elegant. Shame it still relies on BIOS access. I'm looking at something like that but this being Emdebian, it has to be smaller - a lot smaller. An SD card actually, say 64 or 128Mb, containing a complete Emdebian GUI filesystem and kernel (~50Mb unpacked) and space enough to unpack stuff and still retain user data. Plug it into your PDA, WindowsMobile is probably dumb enough to run any old scripting that is on the card and hey presto, Debian. ;-) (Emdebian already has a package set that can provide a full GUI installation with kernel in the space normally reserved for the smallest Debian network installer image. It isn't easy yet, but it's coming along - plus it doesn't need a network connection.) With the current price of such cards, it could almost be a "give-away". That would be good. GNU/Linux on a mini-SD card (or even microSD) - I mean those things can be 11mmx15mmx1mm or less than half an inch square by 1/25" thick in old money. It would need a plastic holder just to stop people losing it! I dare say it could run as a live-SD but I'm focusing on the 'hijack' method. With those mini-SD cards that some phones use (mine has 512Mb), it would be possible to do it with a phone too, once GpePhone is available. :-) Just goes to show: All you need is physical access to any Windows machine and security is out of the window. (Needless to say, once installed, Debian would refuse to run another such card without root privileges (entering that root password could be fun on a phone!) or a connection over a serial port. Most of the packages are ready. What remains now is configuration, implementation and building kernels etc. With a larger card, a variety of kernels could be packaged and some kind of detection support to decide which to use. A while ago DCGLUG was looking at customised CD-Rs to give away but the printing costs were prohibitive. USB keys are cheaper but not that cheap and still need a BIOS change on most systems. SD cards can have larger capacity than a CDR (4Gb or more), small ones are v.cheap and none of the problems of printing - just slap a tiny sticker over the manufacturer logo. Probably best suited to PDA's (because the BIOS will still get in the way on full size machines) but worth considering. With a PDA, just overwrite the bootloader with a GNU/Linux one via a Windows executable and reset. (I'll go back to lurking now - someone has to do all the hacking around here.) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
-- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html