Knoppix is a Perl distribution that can boot and run off of CD. It's a good way to play around with a Debian-based Linux without actually installing it. And it's got Perl 5.6.1 and Apache.

I downloaded a .iso image from one of the Knoppix mirrors and burned it onto a CDR. It booted on my Dell laptop without any problem. (The laptop is skimpy on RAM, and Knoppix recommended against trying to run KDE.) It creates a ramdisk while booting, and copies a minimal amount of stuff onto it. 

  mkdir /ramdisk/c
  mount -t vfat -o ro /dev/hda1 /ramdisk/c

[download]
will mount a Win98 disk read-only (I haven't had the nerve yet to remove the "-o ro"). Wandering around on a win98 disk from a Unix shell can feel kinda strange.

It looks like a good way to get a taste of Linux, and may prove useful in rescue situations if a drive's master boot record gets hosed. No word yet on how it handles networking, though the pieces are there.

It didn't occur to me right away that this is also a way to test code that wants to fork() -- something win98 will never, ever do right.

In reply to Getting a taste of (Perl on) Linux by dws

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