Kolibri : Just 3MB size for this OS!

I am a fan of small operating systems, because, I really suffered the problems of bulky operating systems. I used puppy Linux (It's something great), Damn small Linux etc. Damn small Linux is only 50MB in size and works much fine. Some floppy Linux comes in 1.44MB but it has no GUI at all. A normal user need GUI with some office applications, media player, internet browser, email client, need some programming, and games. But all of the listed above is not included in the floppy linux at all, but almost all are covered by Puppy Linux and DSL. Average of 50MB is happy for me, but for some users, it is too high!. This is what the reason of development of ultra small OS with a size of only 3MB.
The 3MB sized OS is named 'Kolibri' which means humming bird- world's smallest bird. Kolibri is moderately fare OS for eyes with very high performance. In order to increase efficiency of code, OS itself is written is assembly language. I installed Kolibri in my pen drive. The boot up time is less than 3 seconds. I really shocked while seeing the stuff included in just a 3MB. About 30 classic games, text editor, image viewer, text based internet browser, hex editor, assembler,music player, of course a shell and many more. kolibri argues that, it is not windows, linux or anything. It's shell which can accept only 20 commands. But I found all are linux/unix cmmands. There is a bunch of 3D demoes which are excellent.
Go to Kolibri official wesite.
How to install?
You can download iso image and write it to a CD. But I felt ashamed to write 3MB sized iso image to CD. So I opted my pen drive. Installed it using windows XP. It can be installed using linux also. Download image for floppy/hardware first and unzip it. You probably need 7zip for that. Then copy Kolibri.img into thumb drive. Before copy, you need to fromat your thumb drive/pen drive to FAT32. After copying, go to HD_load->USB_Boot directory and run inst.exe then, run setmbr.exe. You need to reboot now and boot from usb. If you don't know how to boot from usb port, you need to read my old post: Booting from CR-ROM or USB devices
Sometimes, you need bulk operating systems to get your job properly done. But this type of efforts of developers seems really appreciable.

Puppy Linux : Give life to your Thumb drive

If you didn't tried Puppy Linux - one of the smallest Linux, core's yet-remember, you have only one life, try Puppy today itself. Puppy Linux - the name is not much inspiring for geeks, but I found it is the most stable and useful OS in the pocket Linux category.
It has the following advantages over other less-sized Linux operating systems.

• Small sized. Ranges between 80MB to 150MB
• Install anywhere - HDD, USB Pen drive, biz. card sized CDs. (You can use ordinary CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs - but it is too big for puppy.)
• Easy to use.
• Official website offers boot time of less than 1 minute. But it is typically less than 15s in my Intel P4 with 2GB RAM.
• Puppy is beautiful than any other pocket OS.
• Smart and crash free. I used more than 10 Linux flavors. Everything crashed, but I haven't experienced Puppy's crash.
• Puppy sessions are saved in *.sfs file. It can be placed everywhere. Puppy search for it at boot time to recover the previous session. There are a number of fundamental advantages for that. I found many of my friend's computers not supporting USB boot. Of course they can boot from a CD-RW but it is not writable. Puppy offers several ways to overcome it. One is that, it can write previous sessions in CD as a multi session write. But it can be used until CD size limits. Another way is to write *.sfs file in HDD (for home usage) or USB pendrive ( for portability) and puppy kernel file in a a CD. So CD can be booted easily and can save sessions.
• You can resize puppy save session file while running.
• Comes with almost all drivers.
• A wide variety of Puppy flavors are officially and unofficially available. These flavors are called 'Pupplets'. Pupplets are intended for a particular task - ie, it supports a task greatly. There are pupplets for painters, gamers, processionals, children, students and so on.
• Brief and understanding tutorials, quick replying forums, community etc.

Once you downloaded Puppy, you have a lot of questions about installation, usage etc. Most of them answered in the official website and associated forums. Otherwise just google for that.

How to prevent virus from USB pendrive

Sometimes attacks of virus through USB pen drives are a real headache. Even though most of them are trivial, anti virus programs may not catch them. Use this following techniques in order to prevent them.

• Make a raw file in the name same of a virus file. Most probably, these these files will be hidden. To view this, a good way is open the pen drive in Linux OS. you can see some names such as "virus.exe" on the root folder of pen drive. If it exists, open it using a text editor program and delete all the characters and if you want, include some raw characters and save. If you don't have any such files, but want to prevent them, you first of all need to find the name of that virus file and make a raw file in any text editor and save it in the same extension of the virus file. I successfully prevented a most common virus named "autorun.inf". Warning : This method not always work.
• Use a good anti virus on your PC as well as in your pen drive. Some good links are http://www.usbantivirus.net/ and http://www.zbshareware.com/download.html
• Format your pen drive well, if your head ache is cumbersome. Some virus programs can override quick format in windows. So use GParted.Prevention is better than cure. Formatting is the last chance.

Booting from CD ROM or USB devices

Booting from resources other than HDD is very simple, but the way in which configure your system for boot from a particular task may differ. First of all, you should know that, the boot configuration appearing on your monitor is independent of the OS, or any other peripherals connected to your system and it is occupied in your BIOS and it may vary for various type of mother boards. Nowadays, many people use liveCDs or liveUSB loaded with their favorite Linux OS for the sake of portability. So I think this tutorial will be useful to you.

After you power on your PC properly, a splash image will appear within few seconds on your monitor probably mentioning about your motherboard vendor or vendor logo. Some keys and their function may be mentioned on the screen.
For example: F9 : Boot menu F2 : Setup
The keys used for boot setup and boot menu will greatly varied. But the major problem is that this splash screen appears for less than a second in some systems so that you can't even recognize what is written on the screen. Here you should do is that press 'Pause/Break' key in your keyboard (It is positioned in between alphabetic keypad and numeric keypad). Then the screen pauses. Then you can configure as you like it. If you now want to boot system normally, press 'Enter'. Each of the operation will be explained while you are attempting to change this. This will not be explained here because this is different for different systems. But in most systems, if you think that you did something and don't know what is the consequence press 'Esc' continuously and probably one dialog box asks you to save changes. Press n/N for No or y/Y for Yes if you want to save changes.

If you want to just boot from CD ROM or like external devices, good option is that select one resource form the boot menu. The way how to navigate to the boot menu will be specified on the splash screen. If not, try F8 because, many systems having F8 as the boot menu key may not be explicitly shown. In boot menu, you can see several sources. 1.FLOPPY 2.HDD 3. CD-ROM 4.USB HDD .Select one which you want to and press 'Enter'. The system try to boot from the source. If fails, system may try a normal boot or a restart. Sometimes some devices for example USB HDD will not be listed until you inserted your memory stick or pen drive to the system before power up. In this case you should insert the USB device and try a restart and do the same procedure. Similarly, you should insert CD ROM to your drive before selecting boot device. One more thing is that if you are attempting to boot from a pend drive (or memory stick or thumb drive), you should select USB HDD. Some other options like USB FDD, USB ZIP may also be listed. One more problem associated with USB boot is that if you didn't enable USB boot in the boot setup (the key for boot setup will be displayed on splash screen), USB boot will be failure. In some systems you have options to enable/disable USB 2.0. All you need to do is that if a USB boot failure occurs, you should navigate through the boot setup menu and do as your need. In this case, the boot selection will not be saved and need to do the same procedure every time you boot time. Otherwise a normal boot will occur.

To permanently setup a boot configuration, you navigate to the boot setup menu and change the 'boot priority'. In normal case, first boot device will be HDD. You can change it to CD- ROM or USB HDD. One thing be noted is that you should give a priority to HDD as second or third device. Hence, if a boot error occur on the first device, system try on the second device (here HDD), so a normal boot will occur. Change the boot priority to CD-ROM as the first device and second device as HDD is a good practice in order to debug your OS, in case of permanent system crash. Here the system ask to save changes. Press y/Y to say Yes, and this configuration is saved on BIOS for future.

If you do the configuration permanently, every time system checks for first priority device and may feel time consuming if you are waiting for a normal boot. If you are doing it in temporary, every time you need to select boot device. It is recommended that you permanently change boot setup in your Home PC while temporarily do in office PCs.

In the worst case, your motherboard will be entirely different thing and you need o read motherboard users manual. If you didn't got any manual on purchase, you can freely download it from the vendor's website. Probably you need to search by the part number. The part number of your mother board can be found on the top side of your motherboard (Hmmm..Best chance to hack your PC).USB boot is not allowed in some old PCs. But all general purpose motherboards not older than 3 or 4 years can have USB boot capabilities.

Slax- A brief review

Yesterday, I found some good stuff on the official website of Slax (It is a simple but very beautiful distro. Yes, it's build up of KDE). Website itself is very cute and everything is simple as like SUSE or Mandriva. I know some real geeks may not like the entire structure of slax, but it will be stunning those who were allured with Microsoft Windows OSs. The simplicity makes everything easy.
One more advantage is that they give a free 30MB online memory which can be easily be used like ordinary disk drives. The memory of 30MB is free for slax users for unlimited period even if you didn't use it for a long time (The info is from the official blog, the unlimited period may be varied. But they didn't commented about it yet). You can use the online memory from any machines that supports slax, or any other OS, even Windows. A 200MB iso file or tar file is to be downloaded in order to make a liveCD or USB. I installed latest version of slax (slax6.1.2) to my SanDisk Cruizer 4GB pendrive and it works fine. A live CD can easily be created, but to do USB installation, you need to work for 2 minutes.
The whole procedure can be done in your windows platform itself. Try this link.
Another fantastic feature I've seen in their website is to run an application without actually installing on our system known as 'activat'ion. Almost all general purpose applications are available as .lzm binary format which is ready for the installation without any dependencies. You can select which software you want to use from modules page. There are three options - first to download (normal download for later installation), secondly 'add to build' which helps to customize your distro before download. If you want to check whether the software listed is good, just do the third method -activate. Then you can use the software as you have installed it in your system, but actually not.

The major advantage is that it is pocket linux (handy) and can be used everywhere. But personally I felt that it has less hardware support compared to Puppy Linux. But I stil like slax because of it's greenish beauty!

Happy slaxing!

Portable programs for your pen drive

Nowadays, there is no need of an introduction to portable applications, but I am starting from introduction before going to some useful portable application links.

Most of the computer application programs are to be installed in your system. It is not a problem in Windows platform just click next->next->.......finish. Quite complicated but amazingly interesting way in Linux. There are several Java programs which is intended for direct work instead of initial installation setups. The problem arises in installable applications comes to play if you are working in your office, college in computer. The computer administrator may prohibit to install your favorite Firefox in the office computer. These problems can be avoided by using some portable versions of your favorite applications. Just download an unzip it in into your pen drive and use it every where. Currently, most applications support portability in MS Windows OS. If you are a Linux user, Linux OS itself become portable to follow you!

Some good links for MS windows:

http://portableapps.com/

http://www.pendriveapps.com/

Here follows a junk of pen drive Linux:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/