When i was 12 or 13 in the very early 2000s i tried to download something called “coyote linux” (from sourceforge iirc) and boot it on an internet cafe pc because i really wanted to try this linux thing.

But i was very nooby and of course it mostly didn’t go anywhere. I have vague memories of maybe getting it to boot, getting a shell and then not know what to do with it.

Fun times :)

I built it to do network-based disk imaging of fleets of Windows 9X PCs in a K12 school district. I used udpcast[0] to receive the image of a FAT32 volume (as a raw dd of the source drive gzip'd) and would stream it in realtime (decompressing and writing) to the hard disk drive on the clients.

I would run the udpcast sender on a "gold master" PC and stream its drive out to as many clients as I wanted (over 10Base-T Ethernet at the time, but later over faster networks). Since the sending PC's CPU was typically the bottleneck the receiving PCs never had problems falling behind receiving and writing the stream.

The most time consuming part of this "generation" of the tool was writing all zeros to the free space on the "gold master" computer to minimize transferring "slack" space (since I was just using dd and not a filesystem-aware tool). I'd mount up the drive in a Linux distro and dd from /dev/zero to a dummy file on the volume until it was full, then delete the dummy file. (One of Jeff's axioms of computing in play: Never underestimate the power of stupid technology.)

I updated the "distribution" in the early 2000's to support NTFS using the various ntfsprogs tools (ntfsclone, ntfsresize) to support imaging Windows XP machines. It was vastly more efficient than the dd method because it only transferred the used blocks of the filesystem.

Since you could make bootable CDs (and later DVDs) using floppy diskette images as the "boot media" I updated the "distribution" again to support mounting a local optical disk and streaming the image off a bzip2'd ntfsclone image. I even added some silly multi-disk "spanning" capability for images >4.7GB. (It was very janky and involved recombining the image chunks in a temporary partition on the local drive, then imaging the machine from that local copy. The I/O contention of reading / writing from the same drive made that very, very slow.)

Finally, when PXE-capable NICs were more common, I would PXE boot the "distribution" (because PXE easily supported booting floppy disk images) and modified it to pull from HTTP, local optical drive, or udpcast.

I gave up when AHCI became common because I couldn't keep up with making the "modern" Linux kernels work with the various models of PCs I was using. I moved over to a Windows PE-based tool in about 2006 - 2007.

[0] http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/

Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running.

Anyway it's neat this can still be done.