I need the help of a Linux guru.


Here's the situation:

My wife does work-from-home call center work. As part of the process to connect to her work network/systems, they have provided her a bootable Linux DVD that she has to boot her computer off of. As you can imagine, even running a light Linux ISO client like this has major performance drawbacks, even with a 3.4GHz P4 with 3GB RAM.

I'd like to 'move' the Linux image off of the DVD and transfer it to a hard drive (or a USB key) so that performance is better for her.

I've tried taking an ISO image of the DVD and booting a VMWare Virtual Machine off of it, but performance isn't that great using this method either.

I know what I would do if this was a Windows image, but my Linux expertise is somewhat limited to VMWare ESX commands. (I can run a mean vi tho )

A big rep boost to whoever can help me with this project

Thanks for your help guys...

Do you know which distro it's based off?

Most recent live DVD's come with an app built in to do an install onto a hard drive.

However, if it's a custom build, it may not have that option . . . but there is ALWAYS a way.

I'll hit some of my sources to see if I can scare something up, but knowing the base distro will help out a GREAT deal.

d

No idea what distro; it looks like it's very basic tho...not much there as far as config is concerned...

Quote: Originally Posted by Joose No idea what distro; it looks like it's very basic tho...not much there as far as config is concerned...

Could be possible to do the following:

Run another live cd distro, or even better if you have one installed else where start from there.

Mount the *.iso as a loop back dev, you might have to make the /dev/loop0 first, do a google for this as I have forgotten the syntax.

Mount the disk that you want to copy it to.

Copy the contents of the iso to the disk you want.

Use Grub or Lilo, or possibly even the WinXP/Vista bootloader (although I don't know how well the vista boot loader works) to boot into that distro. Hopefully the distro isn't set to totally load into ram, otherwise you might have to do some tweaking, I can't help much there.

Quote: Originally Posted by boardboyd Could be possible to do the following: Run another live cd distro, or even better if you have one installed else where start from there. Mount the *.iso as a loop back dev, you might have to make the /dev/loop0 first, do a google for this as I have forgotten the syntax. Mount the disk that you want to copy it to. Copy the contents of the iso to the disk you want. Use Grub or Lilo, or possibly even the WinXP/Vista bootloader (although I don't know how well the vista boot loader works) to boot into that distro. Hopefully the distro isn't set to totally load into ram, otherwise you might have to do some tweaking, I can't help much there.

I get the feeling that the distro they have is a totally customized distro that matches with the companies infrastructure, eliminating anything that doesn't have anything to do with her work.

Joose: You might want to contact the companies IT dept to see if they can help you out as they SHOULD know the distro inside and out.

Without being able to get my hands on it (which I won't request so as not to put her job in danger), I can't really help you out. Most of the detailed and newbie oriented walkthrus/howtos I'm finding are VERY distro specific.

d