TABLE OF CONTENTS "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel at its initial release in 1991
In the first edition of the book we provided a Live CD based on the Knoppix Linux distribution. In the second edition we have improved the Live CD by reworked the entire toolkit utilize a VMware virtual machine in order to provide a robust platform in which to present the examples of Open Source and SOX concepts booking the second edition. While the Live CD was in many ways an appropriate stage for demonstrating a myriad of Open Source technologies our decision to move to a virtual environment was made for several reasons. First and foremost we recognize that there are a multitude of computer systems and software, both Windows and Linux, which might serve as the underlying host system for our toolkit. VMware runs on most computer systems and presents a stable but more importantly a generic (i.e. predictable) platform to take advantage to ensure the toolkit as robust and feature rich as possible. Second, while the Live CD did have methods for installing to a hard drive, this process required the host system to be able to dual boot with an existing OS or take over the target system entirely. On the original Live CD installation of the toolkit is necessary in order to save any changes made to the system, as...
