Dell may join HP in Linux laptop drive (News.com) [LWN.net]

Dell may join HP in Linux laptop drive (News.com)

Posted May 24, 2003 23:02 UTC (Sat) by treed (guest, #11432)
In reply to: Dell may join HP in Linux laptop drive (News.com) by ibukanov
Parent article: Dell may join HP in Linux laptop drive (News.com)

I would prefer laptops without floppy or cdrom. I can attach an external USB floppy or CD ROM if I so desire. The CD/floppy is rarely used compared to the actual machine itself so there is no point in carrying that stuff around.

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Dell may join HP in Linux laptop drive (News.com)

Posted May 25, 2003 22:47 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (guest, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

External USB floppy or CD drives can't be used to boot from. You already need a working OS to use them. So a laptop without an OS and without these drives built-in is pretty useless.

Dell may join HP in Linux laptop drive (News.com)

Posted May 25, 2003 23:05 UTC (Sun) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

I think your information is out of date. Search for "boot from USB" and "boot from firewire" on Google and you'll see that things look different now. Just look at this changelog on the AOpen site - it clearly says: "Supports boot from USB storage device (FDD, ZIP, etc)" in the version from January 2002.