On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 09:25:37AM -0600, tom wrote:
[...]
Better hope your new computer comes with optical
media, especially if its
Microsoft. Better hope it has an optical drive so you can fix it.
The optical drive is so you can fix it by installing an operating system
instead, right? :)
Hardware vendors began phasing out the optical drive
as standard around five
years ago and today few new machines come with one. Much needed if you plan
to install Linux.
I've just bought a USB hard disk that includes a DVD-ROM emulator. It's got a
small LCD and cursor keys on it to navigate the disk's filesystem (sadly, the
only choices are NTFS and FAT rather than anything actually *useful*) to select
which ISO to present. I've not yet used it in anger, but I plan to wave it at
my Ultra 20 to see if I can install FreeBSD from it.
The Sun box does have an optical drive, but I don't care to faff around burning
discs that I'm only likely to use once.