Practical PHP and MySQL: (Negus Live Linux Series)

I'm a Windows user. I recently bought "Practical PHP and MySQL" expecting to install source from the CD provided, but the only access to the source is by rebooting a mini-Linux OS from the CD. I cannot find any way to access the source this way. And there is no Internet access this way since I have a wireless connection and there does not seem to be any drivers for it. Does anyone know of a download site available where I might fetch the source??? P.S. There is a disclaimer in the back of the book stating that there is no technical support for the CD. This OpenCD concept is for the birds.

You mean the Live CD doesn't let you copy the source code over? You should, at a minimum, be able to copy the sources to either, a USB drive or a CD-R. I thought you could copy the sources to your hard drive, even from within the Live CD, but I could be wrong. Then reboot Windows and keep going.

If you just want the URL for an individual package, why not look up the website? Many projects are on SourceForge.net and include a link to download the sources. Freshmeat may also prove to be a useful site.

Also, I'm curious. Did the book come with The OpenCD (http://www.theopencd.org/) or a Live Linux CD? The last OpenCD I looked at was Ubuntu Linux with software for Windows included. The newest OpenCD appears to be a return to their Windows roots. You should be able to download it, though I don't know if they include the sources on the CD.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.

Because the NTFS file system that Microsoft uses on Windows XP does not have an openly published set of standards, the drivers needed to read and write to NTFS are only experimental.

Reading data is non-destructive and is often implemented in Linux, but writing may damage your Windows partition. Since Microsoft is free to change the NTFS inner workings at will, something that works today may fail next week.

This is why most Linux distros limit your ability to write to an NTFS partition.

You should be able to write to a thumb drive (FAT32 is well documented, and therefore supported by Linux), or you could partition your harddrive and create a small FAT32 partition of a few GB and use that.

It is not a limitation of the live CD that is stopping you, but the refusal of Microsoft to publish a standard API for reading and writing to NTFS. They don't have to publish source code or secret stuff, just an API. If they refuse to, they make their users live with these kinds of interoperability problems.