While I've used Linux for years in the virtual machine space, primarily as a "native" location for many of the UNIX-style command line tools (even if I'm using them against an SMB share on the network, they're still extremely helpful), it has never been a primary operating system on any of my PCs outside of novelty "let's see what stage they're at" usage. Where I did use a Unix variant, it was always FreeBSD.

I've decided to give it another go, this time in an "Internet Appliance" of sorts.

This opportunity arose when a hard drive in an old eMachines Athlon 2400+ 512MB WXGA laptop I had kicking around died. It was running warmer and warmer until finally it stopped running altogether. Now it's just lounging on a park bench.

Given that the laptop saw limited use -- mostly for my daughter to play PeepAndTheBigWideWorld games online -- this didn't cause too many tears, and it gives me an opportunity to pursue the internet appliance desire (perhaps in the kitchen. Something that is zero maintenance or security worry, hopefully low power, and that allows for rich web browsing for the family and guests) that I've been thinking about for some time. What I'm considering is running the laptop diskless (meaning no hard drive or floppy drive, though there will be an optical drive -- unfortunately this particular laptop - an M5312 - can't boot off of the USB key, though I'm keeping my eye out for possible bios options. Note that I do not want a hard drive, so I'm not looking for replacement options for it. This is a fun effort, and as I already have another working modern laptop, I just think a diskless device, minus the noise, heat and power consumption of the hard drive, would be pretty cool).

After some futile efforts with Knoppix, my initiatives thwarted by the fact that it refused to work with the Broadcom wireless (either with the native driver or with the ndiswrapper driver), I switched over to Ubuntu's "LiveCD" desktop version and it works amazingly (though the wireless worked much better with ndiswrapper and the Windows Broadcom bcm43xx driver). With little hassle the machine is booted from the CD, the wireless is operating (with WPA and everything), Firefox is updated with Shockwave and various updates, and it's brilliantly usable with complete mobility throughout the home, low power, low noise, and limited heat. I could duct-tape it to a wall if I wanted to.

The only problem is that it's a temporal state, and once I shut down (or there's a power outage), I need to start from the delta of the CD image once again. The latest release of Ubuntu does have a rather sketchy persistent option where, with a bootup option (which is lame), it basically loads everything from the CD, overlays the contents of a USB key image, so you're still starting from the base and then consuming some of the ghost filesystem with the delta. This is on top of the fact that the persistent functionality uses the USB key almost like a R/W filesystem, purportedly constantly writing changes, which would lead to a very short key lifespan. Also I really don't want to save continually changing state, but rather want to choose a perfectly configured point and solidfy it, with each reboot starting exactly there.

What I'd really like to do is to configure the machine and somehow persist that onto a new boot CD, such that the starting state is exactly what I want (realizing that in the future, I may need to make newly updated CDs). Indeed, it is possible to make your own Ubuntu bootup CDs, and I've successfully done so to some success. However I need to get the changes from this live, no-persistent storage laptop onto the image for burning onto CD (many of the configuration steps are making changes unknown to me, so I can't just modify a couple of /etc .conf files). So I've got a Ubuntu virtual session running*, and I've extracted the boot-image filesystem, but it's the process of getting the laptop image over to the image for burning that I'm unsure of. I've tried rsync to dismal failure.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd greatly welcome them. The laptop has a 1GB USB key which it can access, and working wired and wireless connectivity. On the other end is a Ubuntu session with plenty of RAM and storage, ready with a decompressed image to be prepared for burning into the ultimate, personalized LiveCD.

* - the process described to make a custom Ubuntu boot CD -- such as creating a filesystem within a file, and then copying over from the compressed filesystem, completely borked VirtualPC...multiple times. Not to mention that performance in general was atrocious. I then tried under VMWare Server (the free product) and it worked absolutely perfectly, and the performance was enormously faster.

Normally I'm a fan of VirtualPC, but from here on in I'll be doing all Linux work under VMware.