William Tracy wrote:
> Larry Hudson wrote:
> 
>> For my secondary drive I use removable drives.  I have three different 
>> drives I can plug in (only one at a time, of course).
>>  (I like to play with different Linux distros...    :-)
> 
> 
> Are we talking about USB drives? What's the price/specs? :-)
> 
No, they're IDE drives.  The way this works is that the drives are 
mounted inside holders that plug in and out of an adapter in the 
computer.  They have a lock that is both a physical lock (so they can't 
be unplugged accidentally) and a power switch (for that drive).  Of 
course, you only swap them when the computer power is off.

As to size/price -- mine are all 120GB, and IIRC the price was somewhere 
around $70-$80 (US).  But I also have an external 200GB USB I use mostly 
for backups and music files.  (These music files are mostly MP3s I have 
made from my rather large (and old) collection of LPs.  Still working on 
converting more, however.  I might even finish someday.)   ;-)

> It's been a while since I last got adventurous with Linux distros (I 
> settled into Ubuntu and Debian) but I might give it another go sometime.
> 
If you _really_ want to get adventurous, check out LFS -- Linux From 
Scratch (linuxfromscratch.org).  With this you install EVERYTHING by 
compiling from source!  I tried it once but ran into some problems 
(probably my own fault) and didn't get it completed.  But I do intend to 
try again sometime.  It's a very interesting project.  As I said in my 
earlier post -- I'm weird and geeky.     ;-)

However, I primarily use Fedora.  I think I would go with Debian as my 
second choice, but Ubuntu is good too.

> While I'm drifting off topic :-) does anybody know how well Windows 
> tolerates having applications installed to removable media? I've been 
> looking at one of those newfangled flash-based laptops for a family 
> member, but I don't know if she can fit all her software into four gigs. 
> :-(
> 
Yep, really OT...  I don't think there would be any problems.  If you 
try to run a program that's on a drive that's not currently plugged in, 
Windows would just come up with its 'scanning-flashlight, searching' 
box.  But it shouldn't harm anything.  In Windows, I use my swappable 
hard drives mostly for data only, but I have a few programs on them 
which run with no problems.

      -=- Larry -=-

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