Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

I'm trying to help my friend fix his Dell OptiPlex GX400 , which is running Windows XP Home, and is probably owned. It only has 128 MB of RAM, and it turns out this particular model uses expensive 128MB PC-800 Rambus RIMM for Dell RAM Memory . So, it doesn't make sense to buy a chip, really, and none of my spares will probably fit. Instead of throwing hardware at the problem, I looked at Damn Small Linux ( DSL information ) To burn a CD of Damn Small Linux, Download the ISO and then burin it to a CD, in Windows, with InfraRecorder (GPL). DSL is based on Knoppix , but is stripped down to a bare bones set of Debian packages . As promised, booting DS from the CD transformed the slow, almost unusable computer into a speed demon. Plus, DSL shows system resource use right on the desktop , and we could see that it was hardly using any RAM -- less than 20% of 128 MB. Now all we have to do is figure out a way to save the configuration, and configure networking.

[There's been quite a bit of interest in this post and I've expanded on it quite a bit. Please post any comments or questions to help me improve this guide. - Neil] Keith and I have both run into situations where we want to recover a Windows computer by cleaning it up with a Linux Live (bootable) CD distro. This offers several advantages to cleaning up an infected or compromised computer by booting into Windows: It prevents the malware, if it exists, from jumping from the infected computer or partition we are trying to fix to the repair partition or boot medium. If we boot from a CD, there's actually no way to alter the boot medium, since it's read-only. Naturally, we started with Knoppix -- download it here . Installing and scanning with F-Prot is covered in this Knoppix.net discussion thread, Virus Scan from LiveCD , which describes how to install F-Prot from the command line using apt-get. Also, In Knoppix 5.1, you can boot from the Knoppix CD and install F-P...