[NBLUG/talk] Dell N-Series Restore

[William Tracy]

Over the weekend I managed to screw up X on my machine, and finally
broke down and re-installed. I really could have fixed it with a
little patience, but I had been looking for an excuse to see what Dell
has cooked up for their system restore partition on the N-Series. As I
mentioned before, when I mounted the partition, I saw COM and BAT
files, so assumed that it had some flavor of Win 9x.

It doesn't.

When I booted it, I found myself in a console--not a GUI. Beyond the
initial ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO REFORMAT noise, it was
non-interactive, and simply let me watch the status of the reinstall
as it progressed.

Curious, I pressed ctrl+alt+F2--and found myself at a Busybox prompt. Cool!

So, I take back what I said before: Dell's N-Series machines appear to
ship without any Microsoft software whatsoever. There are some
close-sourced drivers installed by default, but everything runs on a
Linux kernel.

After using my 1420n for about half a year now, I'm still happy with
it. My only misgiving to date is that is has a two-pronged power
adapter--no grounding lug. Why, I don't know.

Otherwise, it has been rugged and well-endowed enough for me to use as
my main machine. And it comes with Linux. :-)

Now, to find an excuse to get my hands on one of Asus's EEE PCs...

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

Assembly language experience is [important] for the maturity and
understanding of how computers work that it provides.
                -- D. Gries