already yielded some amusing comments
   ([79]http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39197326,00.htm): 

                               ...............

     Another tried his hand at predicting the future of system speeds. "As of
     this writing (1996) a clock rate of more than about 10 kHz seems utterly
     ridiculous, although this observation will no doubt seem quaintly amusing
     one day," he wrote. 

     Religion was a common theme in the code. "Oops, did not find this
     signature, so we must advance on the next signature in the SUA and hope
     to God that it is in the susp format, or we get hosed," said one
     developer. 

     "God help us all if someone changes how lex works," wrote another. "Oh
     God, what an ugly pile of architecture," moaned a third. 

                                  ...............
            ____________________________________________________

(?) Booting a "Live CD" image without a CD

   From Ben Okopnik 

  Answered By: Kapil Hari Paranjape, Robos, John Karns, and a very useful
                                              webpage by Matthias Müller 

     Hi, all -

     Got a curious Linux problem here that I'm trying to puzzle out, and after
     struggling with it for a bit, I remembered that I'd heard of this thing
     called The Answer Gang... :)

     I'm trying to boot Linux on my fiancee's laptop, a Sony VAIO F590K -
     something that she'd be quite happy to see, since her opinion is that
     Micr0s0ft should have stopped when the going was good - i.e., DOS5.0
     Simple, right? Uh, well... the only problem is that it's got a dead CD-ROM
     drive. She's going to order a new one soon, but until then...

     The VAIO doesn't support booting from USB. However, I've managed to load
     Puppy Linux onto a 1GB USB FlashDrive and burn the appropriate disk image
     (provided by Puppy) to a floppy - it's an ingenious system (the floppy
     boots FreeDOS, which searches for and boots the FlashDrive) that could
     probably be easily adapted to boot other distros... if I only understood
     exactly what to tweak and how. :) I'm afraid that I've met my match (at
     least for the moment) in trying to understand the whole shebang.

     I've looked at many LiveCD distros in the past few days. A number of them
     can be run from USB - but require that the machine boot from the USB, not
     an option here. I've even carefully studied the "Booting Knoppix from USB"
     HOWTO, which assumes the same thing, to see if I could somehow mingle
     Puppy's floppy boot and Knoppix on a USB stick... no luck.

     (!)  [Kapil]  Use Knoppix boot.img on a floppy and copy the KNOPPIX
     directory to the USB stick. This should work provided the kernel+initrd on
     the boot.img supports USB---I think it does but there may be a kernel boot
     option.

     The Knoppix boot mechanism is:

    1. Recognise possible hardware where the KNOPPIX hardware may reside.
    2. Look on all block devices for the KNOPPIX directory and under it the
    3. Transfer control to the cloop stuff. The remaining hardware detection

     I think puppy uses Xorg and also possibly the vesa driver only. You may
     have better luck with Knoppix.

   (?) Oh, and PXE booting is out as well: the F590K does support network
   booting... however, PXE does not (yet) speak PCMCIA. 

   So, given all of the above - what do you folks think? Have any of you had
   experience in booting something like this, or do you have any ideas that
   I've perhaps missed? 
   _______

   Argh.  So  much for writing email while talking on the phone and being
   derailed in the midst of it all by questions about tea selection (from a
   large number of options, I might add - Kat and I are both heavily into tea.
   I think I'll try her kelp tea this time... or maybe the hibiscus...) 

   Puppy failed to recognize the video hardware in the VAIO. Key factor I
   neglected to mention. 

     Ben tries Kapil's knoppix solution, but... -- Heather

   (?) Ooops. Seems like Knoppix stopped using "boot.img" at v3.4 (I've got
   3.7)  -  they  use  "isolinux"  these days. There seems to be a bit of
   discussion on the Net that mentions using the "boot.img" from the v3.3 CDs
   - I've seen reports that it Just Works - but I don't have one available, and
   won't be able to download 3.3 until I get to a high-speed connection. Would
   anyone here happen to have such a thing handy? 

   If someone happens to have a Knoppix 3.3 image, let me save you a bit of
   time (obviously, you'll have to change the ISO image name to whatever it
   actually is, and "/mountpoint" to some existing directory that you don't
   mind using as a mountpoint for a few seconds.) 
# Mount the image
mount KNOPPIX_V3.4.iso /mountpoint -o loop