this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I was digging through some stuff and stumbled on this. To think it's been 15 years. Crazy what you used to be able to get a free CD of back in the day.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Don't, you're making me well up. A while ago my hard drive died and I was looking for a flash drive to live boot. Only one I had was months old. Tried to get a new one, couldn't. Tried to order online, couldn't. It's crazy how hard it is when they used to literally send out the things for free.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Oh, that's epic. Thank you

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@user224
@sabreW4K3
To bad there's no app to turn your phone itself into a live USB, I would have loved that a few months ago

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@user224
Unfortunately my phone is not rootable (every phone I get from now on I'm gonna do more research on first to make sure I don't make that mistake again) but otherwise yeah that's amazing

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I feel you so much on this. My previous phone was a Samsung Note 3 and man that thing just kept going. I used about 5 different ROMs on it over the years. But it wasn't keeping up with apps anymore. Thought I did thorough research when I replaced it with a S9+. Realised too late that some models can't be rooted and guess what I have? Yep, one of those models 🤦🏻‍♀️ Now stuck with Samsung crap for the next however many years because I can't afford to just buy a different phone. Even more so because the screen has cracked twice (fixed first time, can't afford again). My Note3 got thrown off a 2nd story deck onto concrete twice and abused by my kids and kept on trucking no problem (apart from some scratches and dent to the frame). This S9 feels like it breaks being sneezed at 😞

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

to be fair if you don't have a Ventoy stick with a dozen or so distros and recovery tools by now you deserve to be scrambling for a boot disk

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

😱 I'd never heard of a Ventoy stick until you mentioned it. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I hadn't heard of it either, this is super useful! It's funny the things you'll find just around the place on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's the issue with a months old version? Install and then upgrade.

In general, all that free stuff is just not necessary anymore since everyone has fast-enough internet.

Worst case, if you can't write the stick from your phone, go to the local library and do it from there.

Complaining that you only get the OS and the download totally for free without even ads is a bit of a high level to complain about.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh? I can't install because the harddrive died, there's nothing to install to. Regardless, there's not been anything new which I'm in love with enough to buy yet and since this happened, the law regarding USB C got passed, so that meant that I wanted a laptop that was good enough to use everyday for writing, the occasional game and lots of media consumption that I could abuse the fuck out of, wouldn't have to deal with the NVIDIA nightmare and was powered by USB. Maybe it is a high level complain, whatever that means but it's just an experience that happened to me. At the same time, my older laptop that I had running something lightweight and also used just to download stuff and then send it to my NAS also died. So I was just that person that was unlucky enough to be in a position where I was running what I could off a live CD while on the lookout for a decent replacement. Luckily I'm a carer and so I don't actually need my laptop for much.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So getting an €5 USB stick from Amazon is too much to invest?

You can get a 120GB SSD for your laptop for <€10 and that would give you a better performing PC than what you had before.

So I don't really get your point.

So all in all: Spend €10 on an SSD, borrow an USB stick from a friend and use their PC to flash it with Linux. And now you got a PC that can last another few years.

Why would you even run this system from a CD? Performance is incredibly bad from the CD and you can't update or install anything on the CD.

PS: Didn't you say you had a "months old" live USB stick? How would running it from a Live CD improve the situation over a much faster Live USB stick?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The USB stick is fine, but where am I downloading the stick too. I didn't know I could get a SSD for cheap? I just hadn't had a conversation with anyone about it. Ignorance isn't a crime, is it? This whole thread has been an eye opener to me and I've learned of things I didn't know existed. The live CD is a Fedora USB, I bought a bunch of USB sticks months ago and flashed various different systems to them. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Qubes and Tails.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sorry, it wasn't meant to be offensive.

I was just wondering what the issue actually was.

This makes a bit more sense.

The probably best way to go would be to get a 2.5" SSD, which should be compatible with your PC if you had a harddrive in it.

Any one you can get will be better than the HDD you had before. The only relevant point to look for is the capacity, but if you are considering running of a Live CD, I guess you don't need much.

Since you already have some sticks, you can just use any of these to install any Linux to the hard drive, then boot off that, download any Linux variant you want, put it on the stick, boot from the stick and install the OS you actually want.

Since you have multiple sticks, you can even boot from one stick, download the OS you want, install to the other stick and boot from that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you very much, I appreciate the advice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Coming back to this, if you ever see me in a thread in the future. Please just assume I'm the dumbest fuck in the world who is in desperate need of your knowledge 🙏

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry, at no point did I want to imply that you are dumb or something.

I just misread your first post and thought you complained that the Ubuntu people don't give you free hardware. And I'm sorry for jumping to this conclusion without understanding your actual problem correctly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Also with the install disk's running a live version, even a version from a couple of years ago might get you far enough that you could download the newest version from the website and put it on a stick.