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Also try these:

FreeSCO - great for routers

tomsrtbt

DemoLinux

RIP Linux Rescue System

SuperRescue CD

Morphix

For Windows software, take a look here

You can purchase Linux For the Rest of Us from bn.com.

Per BN.com: "A new copy is not available from Barnes & Noble.com at this time. A used copy may be available from our network of book dealers."

You can however buy it from Amazon.

What no one here has mentioned, and what doesn't appear in the reviews is whether or not it comes with a Distro on CD-ROM. I'm assuming from the low price that it doesn't, which is a shame, as it would seem the perfect vehicle for distributing a copy of DemoLinux or Knoppix. Without an included disk, I can only assume the guidance is kept very distro-independent, which is good if you are technically oriented, but I think the people that consider themselves technically oriented and that are interested in Linux don't consider themselves part of "the rest of us". The people that I would put in the category of "the rest of us" are people that would love to try linux, as long as they can do so without downloading an ISO image, burning it to a cd, and then partitioning their harddrive - or alternatively shelling out $20 - $99 for a commercial shrink-wrapped distro.

It's come in handy a couple of times, like when my hard drive flaked out. I talked my non-techie wife through setting up KPPP and KMail over the phone so she had internet access. (Fortunately, it was just a loose cable)

I've used DemoLinux before that, as well as the SUSE demo CD, but Knoppix is much nicer. The only feature I miss is DemoLinux's ability to anchor part of the file system to the hard drive...

All in all, a very nice distribution.

A live CD like Knoppix or DemoLinux will work well, but you are stuck with the cd and have limitations like slow cdrom access. LTSP or Kiosk Linux work well, though they necisitate(sp?) a good network connection.

You could also load a full distro on the HD. With utils like kudzu, Linux handles multiple hardware from one image alot more gracefully then other OS's. Choose a smaller distro like Vector Linux. It was designed to be used on older hardware and has version even for 486 machines. Others have suggested IceWM. That is a good choice as it is liteweight and has similiar interface to Windows. For Browsers, I suggest Galeon (GTK+) if you have room for the GNOME libraries and Mozilla to be installed, another decent choice is Pheonix, though that is kinda new. For email, something lite like Sylpheed (GTK+ again) or Kmail (QT) is good. For Office, Abiword adn Gnumeric (GTK+) is excellent for the Lite stuff. If table support is necessary, then use OpenOffice (and maybe still use gnumeric). A normal install for Vector runs about 300mb, so most any machine should have the space for it.

No. At least, can your drive support 700mb cds? That would be the only restriction. If you are stuck with 650mb, try DemoLinux.

to see what IP you have type ifconfig...you should see a LO and an eth0, if there is no eth0 it's possible that your NIC isn't a supported one. other than that...idonknow. there's also "demo-Linux" cd's that do this same thing but with a complete linux desktop, thier site might have more info for you.

The 2nd time we did this, we simply used fullscreen VNC. In both cases, the boxes looked like an average Linux box... we just didn't need to do any partitioning or installing or annoy the IT department. :^)

At the Whole Earth Festival at UC Davis last year, we handed out about 100 DemoLinux discs to passers-by, so they can try Linux out at home without installing anything.

Is there any effort to make a good installation CD with all the binaries, source, and a windows autorun (either open an html file on the CD or run the full talkbak installer)?


I doubt it's up to date, but check out Demo Linux. There's one or two images you can download.

"Buy hard drive. Buy supported video card. Boot from floppy. Insert CD-ROM with disk image. Reboot. Done."

Boot this. It's a GNU/Linux distribution designed to boot from a CD-ROM disc.

Demolinux is a project that consists of booting Linux from a Live CD.
This is IMHO the best Linux distro for newcomers and it looks quite like what is intended for this project : See Free Software in use without touching one's HD..

There just isn't much of a reason for people to not see what Linux is. My techie friends still are amazed when they see my Linux system and for some reason keep thinking it's a clunky system.

LoB

Make sure to show and hand out some of the bootable cd distro's. Demolinux or . That is a great way to introduce Windows-users to linux.

I recently did an experiment. Like many things, I did it because I had two choices:
1) Wait for the family computer's dead harddrive to come back from RMA and listen to whining and complaining about not being able to download MP3s and pr0n and high speed
2) Try out the cd image of DemoLinux a while back and see how it works.

Having been born without a patience gland, I chose the latter. After all, what could go wrong? I booted it up, hit enter a few times on simple and intuitive menus, and was looking at a X11 GUI login. A few minutes later KDE1 and Netscape 4.7 were up and running with a Java version of AIM running as well.

Next, I rebooted it, wrote down step by step instructions to start it up and setup the network. Only seven steps were needed and three could be done by most anyone.

"Pick your language:", etc.

Even my ancient new technology hating parents were able to start it up and surf away.

The point is, that an old version of KDE+Netscape was user friendly enough for dumb people to use it. KDE3 and newer software associated with recent Linux distro releases like Mandrake 8.2 are even easier. If it was preinstalled on corporate desktops, it couldn't get much easier for people to pick up.

Why don't companies load up Linux on some of their desktops that don't require specific proprietary software? I've seen people doing office work, there isn't much to it Linux can't handle.

For a distro in english, try DemoLinux. It has Gnome, KDE and StarOffice.

I find the bootable CD-ROM distributions more useful. They contain things like X with a window manager and web browser, net connectivity via ethernet or dialup, XFS and Reiser support, and other useful goodies that would never fit on a floppy distro. And CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap, and nearly as pervasive as floppy drives.

My two favorites are related branches, LNX-BBC, a spinoff from Linuxcare's bootable toolkit, found here. Both have advantages over the other, and will fit on credit-card sized CD's, so you can fit 'em in your wallet (try that with a floppy :-)

Another cool one, which also has the advantage of letting folks try a more full-bodied Linux without installing anything, is DemoLinux. It even contains StarOffice on a fully self-contained bootable CD-ROM. Very cool.

-me

Wow you saved me having to write a post about this :) There is another great one i use called lbt (linuxcare bootable toolkit - which was the precursor of LNX-BBC) and you can find it here: http://lbt.linuxcare.com/. The other distribution is demolinux which needs a 700meg cd, but contains a whole operating system including KDE and Gnome that runs off the cd.

I support disseminating Linux as freely as AOL does its CDs.

Perhaps that might be a good idea.

Not only is this a good idea, people are already doing it: http://www.demolinux.org.

Feel free to stop by there, download an ISO, burn a dozen copies and give them to any non-linux using family members and friends.

Among various other improvements, version 3.0 now introduces the Xvesa X server, remplacing the framebuffer used before, which depended on VESA 2.0 cards. We now handle PCI sound cards, Lucent winmodems, Reiserfs version 3.5.x, certain USB peripherals and several other 2.2.18 kernel devices. As for version 2.0, DemoLinux 3 heavily uses a transparent compression schema that allows to sotre over a gigabyte of applications, including GNOME and KDE and the StarOffice office suite. The compression code has been fixed and now it is faster and more reliable. The list of installed packages is here . Notice this time we included highly demanded tools like ssh (which is downloaded on the fly and not pre-installed, due to legal reasons), gpart, dump etc, as well as a version of TeXmacs.

To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:

2-Disk Xwindow Linux

Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.

So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.

To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your .xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.

The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.

Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the /etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.

But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.

Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.

If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.

To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:

2-Disk Xwindow Linux

Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.

So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.

To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your .xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.

The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.

Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the /etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.

But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.

Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.

If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.

I highly suggest using DemoLinux to show people how easy Linux is to use. It has a lot of powerful features such as StarOffice, GIMP, etc. and requires no install to run. First download the .iso and burn it to a CD. Make a boot disk using the CD-ROM, insert both disks into the computer you want to demonstrate Linux on, and reboot. The computer will restart and load X Windows automatically. DemoLinux also gives the user the option to install Linux to the hard drive if the user likes it. This is a great way to demo Linux to anyone, a business or a home user.

Another run-from-cd linux I experimented with is finnix, but it is a little out of date and has no X.

One thing I noticed with finnix is that the RAM disks it creates are small. The demolinux page mentions a warning about the same thing. Has anyone used linux to create RAM disks bigger than 4 MB, and if so did they have to do anything special ?

Many agree that Mandrake is the distro of choice for ease of use and for those who wish to use it as a home OS.

Redhat is quite good for use as a server. They have excellent support for this.

Debian and Slackware are touted as being the purest forms of linux, so you have to do all the configurations yourself. Slower learning curve, but more to learn because youhave to know what you are doing.

Freesco is a nifty little no frills version of linux that will turn an old 486 into a firewall/router for you.

You should really check out demolinux. It runs totally off a CD. You don't even need a hard drive, so you don't have to install it. But you can check out what linux does in a consequence free environment. (It's the Debian edition)

If you want linux to become more prevalent on the desktop, start giving away CD's to people.

Looking at the site, it doesn't say anything about being bootable that I could quickly find. Did the original poster mean bootable as a system, ala DemoLinux, or bootable for installation?

If bootable as a system, that would be something worth checking out!

Having a fully functional system on a disk is extremely handy. I've been using DemoLinux for a while, and having a reasonably full linux system on a bootable CDROM has been darn handy on a number of occasions.

It would be nice to have a DVD version - it would be nice to have the space to install more applications - but on the other hand, there are a lot more systems out today that can boot from a standard CD than from a DVD.

These guys have what you want. I'm not sure how well-funded they are, and they seem rather europe-focused. I think LinuxFormat shipped with a CD at one point

Click here.
It comes on a free CD.
It works, recognizes anything in your computer and it is fully featured (KDE, Emacs, Netscape, GCC, Perl, etc.).
I use it on sensible servers.
you only need to be able to boot on a CD.
BTW, who deliberately bought an LS, here ?
--

> Make a Linux Distro that can boot from a CD, and defaults
> to a Zip or something else for saving.
Like DemoLinux? It is based on Debian and does pretty much all you want, plus more.

i meant www.demolinux.org..bad link earlier.

try http://www.demolinux.org...you can modify it as you see fit.they have a debian version on the way and they currently run a redhat hybrid with suse install tools.

He'd have better luck is he tried Redhats install after going thru the kickstart on the web (www.fezbox.com) or trying demolinux (www.demolinux.org)..wouldbe been a lot simpler. This guy did it the hard way though..im impressed.

The UMSDOS clone worked OK, but the problem is that Linux needs thousands of tiny little files. These are stored rather inefficiently under UMSDOS, and become a nightmare if you need to defrag (for example to partition for a full Linux distro). The performance hit is also noticable. (Notice that WinLinux2000 occupies 500Mb on a FAT32 partition or 1Gb on a FAT16 partition - that is the impact of all those little files).

My guess is that the loopback filesystem, as used by Mandrake's Lnx4win, is a better choice. Hopefully the WinLinux people will add this option in future. Otherwise, a great piece of work - I love the idea of stealing all the settings from Windows.

Also worth looking at is DemoLinux, which runs off the CD.

My laptop now runs Slackware 3.4 in its own (half empty) 120Mb partition, with X, compilers, networking and freeciv. I might try Debian 2.1 if I need libc6.