Hi! Holger,

On Thu, 23 Jan 14, you wrote to me:

 PQ>> I'd like to make a USB boot stick for you, to boot a Puppy linux
 PQ>> Fidonet node that wouldn't affect your OS/2 setup one little bit.

My intentions were scuttled!  I was doing some pre-planning and discovered
that I don't have a ThinkPad T61 here!  The most I can do is do a bootable
stick and put some Fido-related software on it for you to install and play
with.  The next small capacity USB stick that I see here is yours.  Puppy
needs only about 165Mb even for the latest version, however the slightly
older one that I'm running on two other Fido systems only needs 135Mb (well
that's the .ISO [CD image] size); the Fidonet software needs only another
3.5Mb (yes, three & a half megabytes).

 HG> Well, I have been interested in Linux for many years but have put it
 HG> off for various reasons. I had Ubuntu v7.10 installed on one machine 
 HG> but didn't feel like learning yet another operating system.

That's really quite dated now (October 2007).  I've tried running a Xubuntu
12.04 LTS with a Fidonet setup initially done under Puppy, complete with a
BBS and a news (NNTP) server.  (Those versions of Xubuntu are still Ubuntu
but they're supposed to have most of the bloat taken out [in fact,
"not installed" is a better phrasing].)  It worked but was
uncomfortably bloated in any case (the OS required about 3Gb!), and was
prone to constant updates from the Ubuntu support team(s).  So, I switched
it back to Puppy again.  My main Puppy system requires 700Mb for the OS,
and the Fidonet node takes up 300Mb (with a full-fledged messagebase).

 HG> It only happens maybe a couple of times per year that you by mistake
 HG> delete a file and if you don't have another copy of same it's nice to
 HG> be able to recover it which I understand isn't possible in a Linux 
 HG> system. That's one "feature" I don't like.

Ah, yes.  You are dead right.  In my defence: I'm not un-careful, in my
daily PC dealings.  Plus, I always have multiple backups of really, really
important stuff.  E.g. I have seven days' worth of complete backups of my
three Fidonet nodes' PCs, at any one time... sometimes eight days' worth. 
:)

Cheers,
Paul.

... *Real* programmers use COPY CON MYAPP.ZIP
--- Paul's Win98SE VirtualBox