A friend had her Dell Inspiron 9300 give up the ghost this week – and unfortunately it had her un-backed-up Master’s Thesis on it. For reals (hey – sometimes apocryphal stories are true).

The symptoms she described to me suggested out-and-out hardware failure, and I expected that the HDD was probably fine.

Luckily, I’ve got an extra Dell laptop (with a broken LCD but perfectly fine CRT-out) that I could pop her HDD into – but for the life of me, I couldn’t get a Knoppix live CD distro to boot.

So I downloaded the Debian / Knoppix based Damn Small Linux. Amazing – Firefox, busybox, sshfs, XMMS, openSSH and a slew of other tools that fit in a 50 meg ISO! You can load the whole OS to 128meg of RAM.

So I fired up Damn Small Linux, had it load to RAM, mounted an NFS export on my OpenBSD server and copied her files off.

I find the fact that you can fit an extremely useful OS into a 50 meg ISO amazing.