Use a Linux Live CD on my laptop? It's a snap!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My windows xp laptop…3 years old…it keeps on dying. I am going broke and just sick of paying my geek friend to wipe and reinstall the os.

So recently it just would not boot up again. Sigh. So I got this brilliant idea to play with a linux Live CD and see if it worked. I just want to be able to get some of my vital files and maybe get on the Internet…sheesh.

So I burn like 6 different live cd’s. (Knoppix, Fedora, Puppy, …ok maybe only 4…) Then I take them home, pop them in my cd drive and boot. Bam I have a fully functioning operating system running on my laptop!! Woohoo. I grab the critical files I needed off my hard drive (all my karaoke songs!) …and then I am like…hey…i wonder if I can connect to my wireless network?? Turns out I could. It just took the following 12 easy steps:
[ol]
[li]Find the linux network setup tool. I used Puppy so that was easy. [/li][li]Scan for my wireless network…easy…there it is![/li][li]Figure out how to enter my WEP Key…is it 40 bit or 128? Who knows… Try them both… …and TAADAAA! The wireless nic still didn’t connect to my access point. [/li][li]Get frustrated and see if you can get wireless networking going in one of the other 4 linux live CD’s easily? Maybe it will just work? and…Taadaaa one of these has to work right?!! No. None of them worked. Not that easy. Sigh and go to bed.[/li][li](The next night) Start researching how to troubleshoot wireless networking in Linux. Learn all about iwconfig, iwlist, and all those super easy command line tools that make Linux great! Finally… after manually setting all the parameters for my wireless nic…Taadaaa! Come to the realization that something is wrong. Something just aint right. [/li][li]Finally come to the conclusion that my wireless nic uses something called a legacy b43 driver for a particular type of Broadcom wireless chips. And to make a long story short…after hours of testing and wierd commands and linux forum reading…turns out…I need to update the firmware on my chip! HA How hard can that be?[/li][li] You see if I am running Opensuse i type sudo /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware… or if i am in UBuntu i type… sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter I was in Fedora at one point doing this so I had to use a totally different method… After about 3 hours of typing in all sorts of crazy commands and figuring out how the hell to type the correct path the the file I wanted my b43 cutter to extract the inf from and somehow put it on my nic…i think i did it. Not totally sure…because the final message I got was like “unable to create folder” But I saw some other guy also got that message and it worked…so Hell…i guess it worked…everything else looked good… Sigh. Finally. I did it. I updated the firmware for the b43 on my damned old broadcom NIC. Tadaaaa! Wireless nic still didn’t connect to my access point. [/li][li]Well… I had a new theory. A couple posts on a couple of those forums said that the live cd was the problem. I needed to boot from a writeable medium. Well…what the hell. I really liked the idea of booting linux from a flash drive…and i did have one…so I decided to install Puppy Linux to my flash drive. How hard could that be?[/li][li]Run the Puppy universal installer and install puppy on the flash drive. You just follow the wizard, reboot, and Taaadaaaaaa! well… you guessed it. no it did not work. I tried to boot from the usb flash drive and it did not work. My system said “operating system missing.” hmmm[/li][li] (Day 3) Thank god I am divorced so I can spend hours every night working on this kind of awesome shit! Who needs laundry, dirty dishes, and sex twice a month! Ok…why the hell is my usb puppy linux not working??? more research… ahh of course… my Master Boot Record on my USB is not working right…searching searching searching…aaahhhaaa! Solution. I just need something called GRUB to fiix the MBR on my USB! Oh I should have known! What an idiot I am![/li][li]Use GRUB to install a special Master Boot Record to my USB flash puppy linux disk…or something. I don’t know I just did all these steps:[/li]

If your BIOS supports USB, you can make a bootable flash drive using GRUB.
Be aware that some BIOS’s will identify your flash drive as an additional
hard drive, not a USB device. You may have to search through your boot
priority list to find it.

  1. Connect your flash drive. Run a partition manager like GParted and verify
    that its boot flag is set. Or type the command: fdisk -l

    Some flash drives come formatted in “superfloppy” mode. This means that the
    device has no partition table like a regular hard drive, so it will not work
    with GRUB in its current state. If you have one of these drives, you will
    see an error icon when you check it in Gparted. Go to the Updates section
    at the end of this document for more information.

  2. Mount the flash drive and copy the three core Puppy files from the Live CD -
    vmlinuz, initrd.gz and pupxxx.sfs. Older versions of Puppy also used a file
    named zdrvxxx.sfs.

  3. Inside the pup2usb download folder is a subfolder named “boot”. Drag it onto
    the flash drive.

  4. Open the “boot” folder. Note that it contains a dummy file named “marker”.
    Then open the “grub” subfolder and check out the “menu.lst” file. Observe that the
    “root” command refers to (hd0,0) which would ordinarily be your main hard drive.
    When your machine boots, the BIOS will recognize the flash device as the first
    available drive and report this to GRUB.

  5. Unmount the flash drive but leave it connected.

  6. Go to the console and type: grub

    This loads the GRUB emulator.

    At the > prompt, type: find /boot/marker

    GRUB will search for the marker file on the flash drive and will probably
    locate it at (hd1,0).

  7. If GRUB cannot find the marker file, do NOT continue. You have done something
    wrong, or GRUB is not compatible with your device.

  8. While still at the GRUB prompt, type the three commands below:

    (Do NOT accidentally use hd0. This will put GRUB on the MBR of your hard
    drive and erase your Windows bootloader.) <----HEY THANKS MAN YOU DIDN’T NEED TO TELL ME THIS! ISN’T IT FLIPPING OBVIOUS A LITTLE TYPO HERE COULD SHITBLANKET YOUR ENTIRE COMPUTER??!

    root (hdx,0) (where x is the drive number that GRUB reported in Step 6)
    setup (hdx) (there should be some messages indicating success)
    quit

  9. Reboot off the flash drive.

[li]And then i rebooted…and TAADAAAA! IT WORKED! I BOOTED FROM MY USB FLASH DRIVE! So I did accomplish something. So next I tested my wireless nic and… IT FARKING WORKED!!![/li][/ol]

Almost too easy. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t switch to Linux today. I wrote this entire post on my newly wireless capable super puppy linux laptop.

i am just afraid to reboot because i am not sure if my wireless settings will save in linux and i will easily get on the Internet again…but that is a tale for another day…

2

Congratulations! You’re correct in noting that the Live CD is an excellent tool for system recovery, and general work. It is a fully operational system all on the CD.

Your experiences with the b43-cutter driver leave much to be desired, however. When comparing it to the Windows alternative (that is, surfing to intel and downloading the requisite driver, running the wizard, and rebooting), the Linux method is slow and fraught with technical variables.

I’m glad you found it easy, but there’s still a lot farther Linux can go before it can be ready for grandma and grandpa :slight_smile:

3

For a quick data-saving mission, I wouldn’t mess with wireless—I always assume from the get-go that wifi will not work, and I plug it right into the router with an Ethernet cable.

As you found, everything else that you need for basic surfing and data access runs perfect out of the box. Sadly, Linux wifi seems to still involve researching chipsets and such.

Glad to hear you finally got things sorted, and you showed your geek chops :cool:

4

Obligatory link: xkcd: Cautionary

Linux has been attracting me since about 2001, but only this year have I finally managed to get a usable system working. It still does take a certain type of person to actually enjoy searching for the solutions to problems along the way, no matter how friendly the Ubuntu forums are.

5

Linux has been a bit slow to get easy wireless networking going. A lot still depends on the hardware you have - and whether or not it will ever work often depends on whether the chipset manufacturer has released whatever information is necessary for people to create native drivers.

Ubuntu 8 point something detects my PCMCIA wireless card faultlessly, and connects without any fuss to my WPA2 enabled network. Puppy linux does the same on the old thinkpad I’m using as a pseudo-netbook. It’s getting better.

Puppy Linux is a bit frowned upon by many of the other kids in the park, because it implements a user account and security model that is more like Windows 98 than Linux.

6

Learning to use ndiswrapper shouldn’t be a “rite of passage” in Linux though… the wireless on my laptop thankfully works perfectly, so it’s definitely getting better. I don’t have a large sample size to verify that, though.

I find solving my problems on Ubuntu (and more recently, Arch) very fulfilling. I get a nice kick out of bringing about a solution myself, instead of trusting some patch or program to do it for me. Recently, my computer wouldn’t display the proper resolution… and after several days of searching, I finally installed the correct driver (yes, it was indeed that simple). Felt good there.