LiveCD for CF-W2D (Any distro!)

hi all, first post to this section.

Basically, I'm after a distro of any variant's livecd, that will work with panasonic w2

my W2D being so durable and basically quite indestrucable (fallen off countless number of times, once it even dropped from overhead cabin on the plane to the floor) I never took much care with it, so the only movable part in it broke; the hdd.

I've taken the hdd out, and suddenly realise that it's not that easy to find a 2.5" IDE drive anymore (that works with W2, think you'd need to modify some pin so the voltage won't screw up etc...).

This leaves me with two choices

1. el cheapo SSD a la CF-IDE route or
2. find a hdd which definitely works...

since both would take time/money, so I am thinking about a livecd distro however am not sure which works.

So far I've tried ubuntu 7.10(some ancient version), it'd boot and load, but wouldn't get to desktop. and Moblin (don't ask), which fails to boot as it requires PAE for some obscure reason.

As I live in a country with pretty backward internet where data actually cost, I can't go round madly downloading every distro... *sigh*

so, help!!! Anyone who'd tried anything with W2 and linux, I'd like to keep using this little machine!

 

Try Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10. These are the current versions.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

You want the 32-bit desktop version. When you boot it, the default option is LiveCD mode.

I would try 8.04 first, as I've generally found it to be more reliable than 8.10, but of course, YMMV.

Andy

 

By the way, there's an option on the Ubuntu website to have them mail you an official disk. Worth a look if downloading the ISO isn't an option for you.

 

You can replace the 2.5" 5V/3.3V HD in your laptop with a standard 2.5" 5V/5V IDE drive; you have to do a little modding. See here:

http://angasm.org/2006/10/changing-hard-drive-in-panasonic-cf-r3.html

and here, if you read far enough, there is a poster with a w2 who says that he successfully used a late model Seagate 100GB drive with this hack:

http://www.leog.net/fujp_forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6636

As always, if you don't feel comfortable poking around inside your laptop, DON'T DO THIS.

mnem
Your mileage may vary, Mary may not be very merry, Cherry-Berry Dairy Bars are scary, don't let Harry Kerry marry Terry Perry in February.

 

I used to think I was a weirdo. Today's lesson is that everything is relative.

 

E=MC^2 Well... most of the time.

mnem
All things are relative. All relatives are things. My relatives take all my things...

 

Thanks all for the suggestion, I got the ubuntu 8.10 working, but with 256MB of ram and accessing solely from dvdrom's too slow, so I decided to grab a WD hdd. Will leave the cheap SSD option on my other ancient laptop which requires a 1.8" HDD....

 

LiveCD OS setups are generally pretty sluggish, unless you have an option to load the entire disk to RAM. Under most circumstances I wouldn't consider a live-CD format OS (whether it's Linux, or Windows, or anything else) to be a good long-term option.