Thia ia the RescueCD Linux in memory booted from a 250 MB image It is based on Gentoo, and it is barebones, no large fonts supported in the GUI. There is a surprizing ammount of commands in /usr/bin, given that this is a small Linux. That is s testiment to the bloat that it takes to support lots of GUI tools, as compared to a shell-driven system on a tty. I saw a UNIX system that used only 10 MB of disk, and as I recall an early BSD system I used needed only 5 MB.
I am root@sysresccd. What is mounted:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on tmpfs 1.5G 22M 1.4G 2% / /dev/sr0 235M 235M 0 100% /mnt/cdrom /dev/loop0 190M 190M 0 100% /mnt/livecd tmpfs 1.5G 22M 1.4G 2% /mnt/memory udev 10M 148K 9.9M 2% /dev tmpfs 1.5G 8.5M 1.5G 1% /lib/firmware /dev/sda1 222G 69G 154G 31% /mnt/windows
The NTFS filesystem can be mounted with mount, but it is RO.
To get it RW one must:
# ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows
The mount point is as shipped with the system. Never use just /mnt !
There is an item off the system menu that shows all know filesystems. It must get the volume label off the hard drive and show the partitons as mapped on /dev. Hence I could read the COMPAQ, is /dev/sda1 and I already figired out where to mount it.
I had created other files, but couldn't write them to the NTFS partition, so they were lost. I should be able to do that now.
Back on Vista. The file I created from Rescue CD Linux is on the NTFS filesystem and I moved to the home dir for my cygwin install where I am editing it with emacs, really Xemacs 22. The editor on the Linux was gemacs. It is inseed a testament to the ingunity of the prople who wrote this small Linux that they could get an emacs to live on such a small distro, but then again, I remember installing Gnu Emacs from one 9 inch tape. The size of the packages from most Linux repositories is about 60 MB. I would imagine that qemacs is much smaller than that. Joe and Vim are there as is a GUI based editor. Open Office is not there because it is so large.
The file manager is minimal and it is designed for comparing directories, definately not Explorer or Konqueror, but because Firefox is there, it can be used as a file viewer. I looked at the earlier version of this file and some images on this disk using the Browser. I did notice that the distro didn't seem to get web servers right, and I havn't looked into networking problems. I should check that networking is OK inside Vista.