[falsaberN1]

At one point in the very early 2000s my HDD failed and I was diskless for a while. I used Knoppix to be able to run things using a floppy to store my configs. I've been using Linux as daily driver ever since. The necessity to do a trial by fire made me pretty good at it and helped me in my professional life as well.

Thank you Knoppix.

[Scoundreller]

Similar but with a 16mb usb drive for my settings and apps.

Ran pretty well since I only used an msn clone, web browser, occasional types assignment and some Winamp clone. Had an an external hdd for my media do it covered everything and just worked.

Boot times didn’t matter cuz it was so stable.

[falsaberN1]

I quickly learned to symlink certain things (usually the least-updated ones) to folders in $HOME, and put together some bash scripting to copy stuff back and forth. By the time I had a replacement disk I was already somewhat fluent. And yeah, hardly ever had to reboot, only when doing radical changes in setup. I remember I was using windowmaker instead of the default KDE 3 after a while, although I don't quite remember the thought process that led me to it.

[anthk]

Im my case I think it was, at the grub/lilo/syslinux prompt:

          knoppix/linux (or any other kernel image) lang=es desktop=wmaker dma=on 

And a bunch of other options maybe.

[falsaberN1]

Ooh, didn't know it was possible to specify the desktop like that. Maybe I'll try it in a VM someday for fun.

[farhaven]

My setup was a Compaq Armada M300 laptop with a keyboard that was missing a few key caps, a battery that was shot to all hell and held only 5 minutes of charge, and a HDD that was completely broken.

I used a 128 MB USB stick for settings and my home directory, and had a Knoppix disc in the CD drive at all times.

It did indeed run pretty well, at least well enough for me to play around with it as a 14-15 year old kid and until I had finally saved up enough money to get me a new (used) 20GB HDD on eBay.

Good times. I kinda miss it.