Installing Linux on a machine without CD-ROM

Quite a few of the new machines (called Netbooks) arrive without an optical drive. However, they are capable of booting off their USB drives, and installing Linux on them is not too difficult. Just get one of the USB distributions from the Net.

However, if you have a laptop without an optical drive, and cannot boot from the USB port either, then the following might be of some help.

1. Remove the HD from the laptop and install it in a USB enclosure
2. Attach this drive to a machine with Linux already installed
3. Use cfdisk to assign partitions.
4. Format the first partition on the disk as ext3 using the mkfs.ext3 command
5. Mount the new partition (say /mnt/disk).
6. Copy the /boot of the machine onto /mnt/disk
7. Edit /mnt/disk/boot/grub/menu.lst, but leave it as hd0
8. Start grub as root, and type:
   root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)
quit


Copy the installation boot image on to /mnt/disk/, and the installation ISO image on to another partition on the drive in the USB enclosure

9. Unmount all partitions on that drive and disconnect it from the host machine.
10. Remove the drive from the enclosure and install it on the laptop
12. When the system boots, go into the grub shell, and type :
    kernel "path to vmlinuz"
initrd "path to initrd"
boot

13. When prompted, point to the ISO on the disk, and proceed with the normal installation.

Printing

A lot has been said about eliminating paper altogether, but printing documents is something we cannot seem to get enough of.

Printing Speed

The number of pages per minute printed is something that is quoted by all printer manufacturers, and we tend to compare numbers from different catalogs without giving it a second thought. However, what exactly is being printed? The printer manufacturers have not, so far, published the documents that they used for the tests. Even the driver setting used to print is usually the draft mode of the printer. All that is about to change with the ISO standards for printer speeds. Now, you can argue that the pages the ISO considers are not representative, but at least it seems to have forced companies to publish according to those standards.

A notorious company with regard to published printing speeds is Canon. Test according to the latest standards show that the printing speed for the their latest and greatest inkjets is only about 20% of the older models. Now, they have not moved the old models from their website, and they mention that they will only benchmark the new (2009) printers with the ISO standard. Lest their duplicity be discovered, they have come up with a new term called ipm–images per minute. The term would make sense if they were printing photos–they are after all, images. However, the standard ISO files are NOT images–they are regular documents, the kind that you would prepare for a report or paper. Note that as of writing of this blog, there is no ISO standard for photo printing.

Print Cartridge Life

A similar idea is that of the life of the cartridge. Once again, the companies that make these cartridges claim all sorts of things with all sorts of details like coverage areas and the like. A 5% coverage area has been bandied about. Once again, ISO has introduced a standard, which is now being followed by the companies concerned.

Cost of Printing

The actual cost of printing is always more than the cost of the paper and ink for a given number of pages. As the printer ages, the problems like paper management grow, and wastage is quite high. If the printer is not brand new, you can forget about things like duplex printing, as there is bound to be an error somewhere, and you might end up discarding the whole lot.

One idea most people would have, considering the cost of print cartridge is–why can’t we refill the cartridges? This would be quite economical, and there are two ways to go about it. One is to manually refill them, with a syringe. Here the quality of the replacement ink is important. Equally important is the need to maintain a good vacuum while refilling. The other method is to have a continuous ink system. This means that you have an external tank(s) which you pour ink into. You can see the level of ink and can probably do it till the head wears out.

In the case of cartridges with more than one color, the precise location is important. Alas, a common error that occurs during refilling of color cartridges is the mixing of the different colors. Isopropyl alcohol (IPA) is said to be a good solvent in the case of printing inks.