Ah yes. Hardware backdoors always trump software security.

I am mildly curious about why a linux user was wasting his time talking to Geek Squad... In my experience they are generally a bunch of highschool graduates with a "How to do X on Microsoft Windows" checklist.

I just recently built a live CD with an RDP client. The rdesktop program, from the pet repository, which runs behind the scenes, was segfaulting in puppy 4. So I recompiled it. Sorry, no sound passthrough. I didn't need it, and including it would have been a pain. But you're welcome to give it a try...

General practice for encrypted file systems is to put the heavy key (In this case, the 128 bit AES key) in one of the first sectors of the file system, encrypted with the user's passphrase. I would bet that puppy's AES encryption is roughly as strong as TrueCrypt's AES encryption. TrueCrypt has the ...

Were I you, I would likely try MEPISLite. It's *almost* as good as Puppy for old hardware, as it's base memory footprint is only about 50MB. It is also built from the ground up to be multi-user and the Likewise .deb package should theoretically install and work. It's also a bit easier to install sec...

On modern hardware, for general-purpose use, I generally use something based on Debian. Debian, Ubuntu, Mepis, et cetera. Why? Two words: Package Management. Yes, I know you can install Debian packages on Puppy. I've done it quite a lot. It's comparatively painful. Much easier to slice the resource-...

I have never disassembled one enough that I could watch the inner workings while it is reading, but listening to an optical drive, it sounds to me a lot like it seeks back and forth between the track's table of contents and the actual files while it is reading. Leastwise, I can hear the read-head sk...

Except that you don't have to read all the data. Just the file names. If it doesn't exist already, and there's no deletion marker, then you copy it. Otherwise you don't. Basically it's a "cp -u" (copy only if destination is older than source or does not exist), and since you're going last ...

The time I tried moving to a new disc, it actually made the problem worse. I suppose I should clarify a bit with the results of some of the experimenting I did once I no longer needed the system to work. The amount of data on the disc seems to actually be fine. It all fits into memory on bootup. How...

Yes, I've read it before. I just went through it again, and it kind of confirms my guess about what was happening. I'm thinking the pup_ro1 ramdisk is too small to hold all the saved files, so it skips some, and then when the pup_rw is created and layered on top of it it gives the same 200MB of free...

Well, I'll keep that in mind. I usually end up using the multisession option though when I don't want to mess with the harddrive.

Nope, no swap on an internal disk. It was a temporary solution for my mother's XP machine when it died. I have since rebuilt it. (It's still XP since she uses programs that defy my attempts to make run or find substitutes for on Linux.) I tried both 3.something and 4.something, both exhibited the sa...

I'm running a multisession live DVD on an older machine, and have run into an irritating issue. I started with 4.00, and went to 4.1 to see if this problem was fixed, but no luck. This machine has 512MB of memory. This turns into about 200MB on the free memory indicator. This amount stays pretty wel...

If you're going to reformat and reinstall windows to check the status of the hdd, then be sure you do a "full format" not a "quick format." The quick one doesn't verify all the sectors, so it might miss some bad ones, which puts you right back where you started. How much extra di...

I found that funny, reading "shallower learning curve" and Ubuntu in the same paragraph. More funny, because I think you are referring to Ubuntu has having a shallower learning curve. In my experience trying to teach people how to use them, if all you're doing is email, web browsing, and ...

I do a fair amount of virus removal/emergency backup of data type stuff for people. What I use depends on what kind of hardware I am working on. If the computer on which you are working has only one CD drive, then yes, Puppy is a good choice. Why? For the sole reason that you can take the disc out o...

Two ideas for future reference. 1: There is a program called unetbootin, which seems to work fairly well for installing to machines with no usb and no CD. Download it, download the ISO of what you want to install, and it will modify the bootloader on the HD and add an entry to boot the ISO. Be caref...

Why does it seem that posting my question is the fastest way to find the answer on my own?

The command for setting serial port parameters, which works with both normal and USB ports is stty.

stty -F /dev/ttyS0 9600

will set the first serial port to 9600 baud.

I have a machine with one serial port, I need two. Ok, no problem, I plug in a USB adapter, and now I have two. Then I run into a problem, because I need both ports set at 9600 baud. I can open cutecom and set them and both will work just fine, but the application for which I need two ports requires...

Not sure where to put this, but at: http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php there is a "which distribution?" quiz to help people new to Linux choose. I've seen it linked to in several places, it might be worthwhile to see about getting puppy listed. Especially since their list of distr...