Linux innovations 16307

Right, late 80's through early 90's. As far as booting was concerned, the Mac didn't care whether you were booting off of a CD or hard disk. It just looked for a block device that had a bootable HFS parbreastion.

So, if you took any hard disk that was bootable, and simple made an HFS CD out of it, you ended up with a bootable CD that had all the applications and files from that hard disk.

Probably the reason you didn't see live CDs take off like they did with Knoppix was that there was no point on the Mac. On the PC, there are plenty of situations where you might want to temporarily turn, say, a Windows box into a Linux box. Knoppix is great there. Or you might want to try out versions of KDE or something later than what is on your Linux box, and if Knoppix has those new versions, it is a quick easy way to do this. It's a great way to check hardware compatibility, too...when my sound card did not work in SuSE 9.1, I booted Knoppix, where sound worked, and then checked to see what modules it was using. I then forced SuSE to use those modules, and sound worked on SuSE.

On Macs in the 80's and 90's, there generally wasn't much need to turn a Mac temporarily into a Mac. :-)

-- --Tim Smith