[nmglug] nicer debian install CDs

[Mark Galassi]

    Mark> Another tip: "quemu" is very nice and quite mature given how
    Mark> ambitious its scope is.  I have experimented with GNU/Linux
    Mark> distro installations with qemu, and it works!  If you want a
    Mark> pleasant surprise, try the very simple sequence:

[...]

I did some more exploring.  I heard about the "really really small"
live-cd distros (these will be of interest to the person who was
concerned about a low-resource laptop back in June).  These fit in
50meg to 70meg, and they are impressively useful for the size,
although you have to use "dillo" or another browser, and they don't do
forms and tables very well.

These super-tiny distros can in principle fit on 128meg USB sticks,
and there are a few ways of doing it.  Puppy and Feather Linux
explicitly mention how it's done.  I have not yet found a totally
smooth procedure to do so.  The one that looks best is DSL (Damn Small
Linux), but they don't have an explicit "move to USB pendrive"
procedure.

Here are the links:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

and to boot one of these ISO images with qemu I use instructions like:

qemu -std-vga -user-net -boot d -hda ~/qemu/damn-small-lskimage -cdrom /usr/local/src/dsl-0.8.1.1.iso

(note the "-std-vga" argument, since they use smaller X servers which
work with the vesa driver and that option)

I would love to do some "live USB memory stick distro" hacking at the
next meeting.