The Mach Boot screenshot from the other day is still astounding to me, and while it’s an impressive piece of work, I get the feeling it does cut a lot of corners to get the job done.

I don’t fault that; I have a long history of cutting corners to make Ubuntu do something special. 😉 I did give Mach Boot a few more hurdles and the results were not always as astounding.

I get no USB love from it, which I believe to be the fault of my hardware; according to the BBS pages, USB should work. You’ll have to handle it all manually, but it should be there.

On my older laptops, it had no way of communicating with the PCMCIA network card, which meant there was no network available to them. It’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to throw stones about that. Any time a 450Mhz machine can reach the desktop in under 2 minutes off the CDROM, I’m happy.

I wish I could get a better screen resolution than 1024×768 (particularly on my 1600×1200 LCD), but all my efforts to kick X into different dimensions have fallen short. If you find a way (other than editing the ISO), let me know.

Overall it’s a fantastic experiment. I love that it comes with almost nothing, and leaves you with nothing. I’ve considered adding the ISO to my root directory and adding it as a boot option under Grub, but I’m holding off for a little bit. Anticipation is something worth savoring. … 😀

P.S.: If you want some visual inducement to try it, there are a mess of YouTube videos of Mach Boot in action. …