Installfest 'would like to'

[eculbert]

I recently got a dell optiplex gx270, p4 2.8 mhz, 1gb ram, w/40gb hd. I would like to 'play' with a couple distro's on a usb hd adapter box and boot from them. I cannot bring the monitor..riding the bus, but can bring all else in a backpack. So would like to play with fedora and ubuntu and set it to boot from those two via grub or whatever w/o touching the internal hd if possible. The bios has supposedly a 'selection' of usb or internal hd. I have never done that and hopefully someone can furnish a monitor as carrying a monitor AND the other stuff plus my bicycle on city buses is a bit much. Let me know either via re to this or privately.

I have pclinuxos on another hd, and put that in the box, told the bios to look at the usb and it sat there for well over a minute before I gave up. I thought it should have came up, but then those os's on that hd were setup on a p3-800..don't know if that mattered to attempt or not..like I said, newbie to usb booting here.  The box is seen and I copied files over to the 40 internal just fine. Maybe I 'jumped' too soon, but it just hung on usb booting. I can download files from it, but didn't boot from it or attempt to and fail...just blank screen when trying to boot off the old hd. 

Oh, the usb box will have a 'virgin' hd in it or can be reformatted as nothing important is on it. I bought that hd awhile back..wd brand and I don't think anything is on it. Will put in the usb adapter box. 

I have pclinuxos2009 installed on the 40.

The cdrom, yes, an old cdrom only that came with it sometimes takes 2-5 retries to pickup an install disk! Hey, it IS an old system from some office sold via a dealer at the swapmeet. So if someone has a usb cdrom, maybe that or net install might be the way to go to the usb hd. It took reboot about 5 times for its cdrom to find the pclinuxos cdrom before timeout and default to the xp hd. But seems to do okay once the cdrom beats the timer! Oh, this is the 'low profile' box so it uses a laptop disk type cdrom/dvd reader/writers, not the full sized ones. 

Anyhow, would like a cdrom(s) copy possibly. Or do you want me to burn fedora core and ubuntu with the 'ancient one' cdrom burner on the old system..p3-800 myself and which 'flavor' to burn. \

I mostly just surf and save files related to ham radio mostly.

I am tight $$$ wise, not tightwad, just no wad of $$$ to be loose with!! other than my brain!! hihi.

73

Ed/ke7feg  ....Now that 'the heat' is here, Hurry up November!

On 2/23/2007 the morse code requirement was dropped for getting 
a ham license. Now just pass the written exams which are on the 
web at arrl.org for questions and http://www.kb0mga.net/exams/