Hi all,
A CHIRP user has put together something very useful and made it available to the community. It is a "live CD" with CHIRP pre-installed. This concept is common in the Linux world, but if you're not familiar with it, here is a brief description:
Users can download and burn the live CD image to a disc (or a USB stick), which makes the media bootable to a self-contained version of Linux, completely separate from your regular system. Linux supports almost every USB-to-serial adapter without fussing with a driver, which makes this a very easy way to program a radio with very little else (besides a programming cable). Booting this CD on relatively recent hardware is likely to be very easy, and will land you in a point-and-click environment with CHIRP already running for you.
If you routinely program other people's radios, having this disc in your toolkit should mean that you can boot just about anyone's computer to an environment that will run CHIRP, saving you from having to figure out which driver their hardware needs and modifying their system.
If you have trouble with drivers or other issues on your own system, this would give you a relatively simple way to run CHIRP outside of the rest of your system, and without making any changes to it.
If you're interested in checking it out, go get it here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/chirplivecd/
Be sure to thank Bob (who is on this list) for his hard work!