Booting Up

To start the ASC, simply put in the CD and set your BIOS to boot from CD-ROM. At the first screen, you can select a wide range of screen resolutions. Even non-standard ones such as 1400X1050 and 1600X1200 are available. You can also boot from USB CD-ROMs, which are common to some ultra-portable laptops.

The next screen lets you choose the keyboard language layout. The DVORAK layout is not available, which hurts the DVORAK typers out there (like myself). Of course, if you don't type on a DVORAK layout then this doesn't matter. The real magic starts after you pick the keyboard layout.

Since the ASC is based on Knoppix Linux and the 2.6.6 Kernel, hardware compatibility is amazing. You can see THG's review of Knoppix in this article. ASC detected every ethernet interface on four different laptops and three desktops. ASC detects USB keychains and hard-drives. Those are mounted in the /mnt/sda1 folder.

I tested five wireless cards; US Robotics, Linksys, Buffalo, MSI and Cisco Aironet (not pictured below). Only the MSI card was not detected. The popular Atheros wireless interface that is built-in to many laptops was also detected.

Figure 1: Auditor handled all these except the MSI

Updated 2 July 2004
Cards [and chipset if known] used were:

• Cisco Aironet PCM350 [ Cisco ]
• Linksys WPC11 ver3 [ Conexant PRISM III ]
• Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11 [ Lucent Hermes ]
• US Robotics USR2410 [ Conexant PRISM II ]
• MSI CB54G [ Broadcom AirForce ]
  
• Toshiba Satellite laptop integrated [ Atheros ]

Figure 2: Networking interface details