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It is easy enough to run Linux from a Live (Bootable) media or to install a VM based Linux box. You do not need a dedicated box.

https://www.kali.org/

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

https://www.vmware.com/products/player

Congrats! TAILS accomplished what Knoppix first did 14 years ago! http://www.knopper.net/knoppix...

http://knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix701-en.html

They have lots of mirrors. Just try a different one.
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

Experimental support for UEFI-Boot (DVD: 32 and 64bit, CD: only 32bit) after installation on USB flash disk.

In order to create a bootable USB-medium (memory flashdisk, SD-card, digital camera with USB connector, cellphone with microSD, ...), the program flash-knoppix can be started from a running Knoppix system. This program installs all needed Knoppix files onto the FAT-formatted flashdisk, and creates a boot record for it. If desired, the target medium can be partitioned and fornatted, or left in its inistal state, so that existing files stay intact. The KNOPPIX Live System starts and runs about factor 5 faster from USB flash disk than from CD or DVD!

It looks like you have to get a Knoppix system running first before you create the thumb drive, but with your Mac all that requires is a little time with Virtual Box (or equivalent). Give it a try and post the results!

This works better for the CD-sized version of knoppix if you have only one-Gig of RAM, if you've got more than 6GB RAM, go ahead and use "toram" for the DVD-sized versions of Knoppix.

.

I've got a lot of specifics in by firefox setup and I hate it when I liveboot and need to reconfigure all my browser specs and reinstall all my addons, so I personally have a couple of preset settings for my iceweasel preferences that I keep saved as tar.bz2 files on my live-boot Knoppix usb-stick:

.

I generated the pref-tars in my home directory with

tar c .mozilla | bzip2 > m.tar.bz2

and have a setup.sh file called at boot-up which cd's to the home directory and runs

tar xvjf /path-to-stick/prefs/m.tar.bz2

There's no reason that you couldn't back up your browserprefs.tar.bz2 file somewhere on a server.

If you don't have vision that's not a problem that has anything to do with mainstream distributions.

But an excellent distribution is: http://knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html

Same here... I really like playing with KDE in KNOPPIX, but it has never quite made it to my desktop for some reason. I suppose I just like the simplicity of gnome-terminal (once I hide the menubar and scrollbar), and am also more familiar with how to strip down gnome-panel to the bare essentials. I don't really use much else from the desktop environment outside of those and the window manager.

Haven't really played with KNOPPIX much lately, mostly because I like running 64-bit systems. Ooh, looks like KNOPPIX does support a 64-bit kernel now as a boot option, and has a 64-bit chroot system. Maybe it's time to take it for a spin again...

Any other good KDE LiveDVD distros?

Download the ISO, burn it to a CD, reboot.

But that's the beauty of Linux. Linus may be "a geek, a developer" and may indeed be out of touch with what companies need, but that's okay because RedHat and Novell stepped up to fill that need. Meanwhile Daniel Robbins created a distro for those who either like to tweak and build bleeding edge systems or who need systems that don't have to be rebuilt every couple of years when the packages are all out of date. Mark Shuttleworth built a distro for people who want a version of Linux that just works right out of the box. Klaus Knopper had the great idea to create a distro you can run from a CD instead of installing on a hard drive.

This is cool because you can use the right distro for the job at hand. We use Gentoo where I work because we can keep our servers up to date with minimal downtime -- we don't have to rebuild our servers every time we want to upgrade. I run Slack at home because, well, it's what I learned first. I've got a hard drive install of Knoppix on a laptop because I couldn't boot from CD on that particular machine, so I pulled the hard drive, mounted it in an external enclosure, booted Knoppix on another machine and followed the instructions for a hard drive install using the USB drive, then reinstalled the hard drive in the laptop. I knew Knoppix was very good at automatically detecting hardware, so I felt Knoppix would have a good chance of working on the first install (it did).

And, if a PE boot disk is illegal, this works quite well:

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

I'm a College student in Maine and I cant afford My Medical bills or most commercial software. The later of the two led me hear to answer your comment. By way of choosing to use Linux.

In my opinion the argument that the flow of good Art will slow to a trickle, code weavers will dry up and guitarists will stop playing music when we make copyright and D.R.M. laws FAIR is a bunch of crap.

I belive this because I see it everyday when I boot Ubuntu or Knoppix and everything just works. I see it right now looking at Mozilla Firefox I don't spend 50% of my time and half my cpu cycles running Malware scans. Theres an Increase in productivity for you.

I for one will continue to advocate open source software, reject D.R.M. and "Intellectual proprietary.".

Many people seem to believe that Norway's putting itself at the forefront if a political movement that may be the story of my generation. How we Control the Peoples access to data, its content and depth thereof.

I do agree with you on one thing the current climate or copyright law and D.R.M. is easily comparable the state of big Pharmaceutical. Our coverage is like our software and fear is used to push pills like they were Norton Anti virus.

As for it copyright fairness leading to bad health Norway has a great social health care system, here I cant afford a month of meds. I have to pick them up a few at a time and I am not alone there.

If you were to step into my shoes you might just smack the words out of your own mouth...

Then, (if you're really brave, or just stupid), boot back into Windows.

At that point You may also have to delete references to symantec from the registry. (but hopefully not)

From Knopper.net:

Experimental script for creating a bootable flash-pendrive from a running KNOPPIX live session (mkbootdev by Martin Öhler)

I haven't tried it myself but I've read comments from others who have and they say it works great.

Once you've pulled out those pieces, then you can hopefully boot (what's left of) Windows, run some of the Windows-centric anti-virus ware in hopes of finding those pieces that clamav didn't find.

LiveCDrom Distros: All my school kids start with http://pclinuxos.com/ and it's 5500 programs. Out the Box solution. I use it. On at least a dozen of my systems, (8 of my systems are Mac OS9 and OS X). On many of my dozens of older machines, http://knopper.net/knoppix rules, also! Damn Small Linux is great for the really oldies, plus, for the absolute newest ones! Firewall/router is http://ipcop.org/ I keep a single M$ XP Pro machine around, but, rarely spin it up. Maintenance (security, 7 protector programs, it wears out harddrives, prematurely!) isn't worth my time. Maybe if I was a "PC gamer". But, I do play some games on GNU/Linux. Operating systems are tools to make the machine do work. I choose those that do the particular job best. Play, and learn, then choose! It is about absolute freedom and ownership of MY DATA!

Selling a computer without Windows wouldn't make it useless, it would, however, make it cheaper.

also: to have a computer that works, you also have to sell it with an OS that works ... and that immediately disqualifies Windows
/ducks

Here's what I have in my CD case, in approximate order of how regularly use them...

Memtest86--because the RAM in the cheap PCs I come across sucks. Some of the other tool CDs have this one as well, I like to get the latest one regularly here. Good for stress testing, and even handy for figuring out things like whether the RAM is running correctly in dual-channel mode.

SystemRescueCD--I particularly like the partition editor and imaging utilities. Been weaning myself off Partition Magic/Drive Image even for Windows work with these two.

Ubuntu live CD and DVD. The CD works in more systems, the DVD version is a completely usable system with a lot of stuff in it. What most impresses me about the Ubuntu live disc is that I can download packages over the network and install them, even thing that run as services, from the live environment. I actually got PostgreSQL installed and some database tests completed, all without a single Postgres file on the media.

Knoppix--Some days, your first choice in Linux live CDs just doesn't work on a random machine; that's why I still carry around this one as a backup.

Bart PE--A bit of a pain to build the first time, but very handy for fixing Windows machines.

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor--this one has been less useful lately, as I've been running into NTFS partitions it really doesn't want to write to. My fallback position is to use this to generate a new SAM file, then copy it over with a BartPE disc.

RedHat Enterprise 3 and 4 CDs. While not technically live CDs, you can do a lot with booting into this environment, and I deal with enough people running RedHat versions that they're worth carrying around. I still keep one of the older versions around so I have something running the 2.4 kernel to tests against; occasionally I'll run into some old hardware that 2.6 pukes on, while 2.4 still works great.

May I ask what you do with over 5GB?

I routinely use 20-30 GB/month, and that's when I don't use BitTorrent. 5 GB/week would keep me pretty much perpetually bandwidth-limited.

How many Linux distributions can you download and USE in one day?

The last Debian release alone was 8.5 GB, and that's only for i386. Source code is another 8.8 GB. (These links are for reference only, if you want to download Debian CD/DVDs, go here to avoid flooding the kernel.org mirror.)

On top of that, you'll probably want to download a live CD such as Knoppix.

But to partly answer your question, I've recently downloaded 5 distros in one day. It was 3 different versions of Mandriva (which is a terribly-designed OS, IMHO), Fedora Core 5, and Knoppix. Coincidently, it was because I was doing some work my university hired me to do (though I don't live on campus).

Personally, though, I'm not sure that all students in residence should be required to pay for more bandwidth than is reasonably considered necessary for their education, so 5 GB/week is probably fine as a baseline, as long as:

1. No punitive actions are taken for exceeding this bandwidth. (Just throttle the connection once usage gets too high, which will happen legitimately from time to time);
2. The traffic is metered outside the local network (local traffic is exempt); and
3. Individual students have the option of paying for better service at a rate comparable to what is offered by high-speed Internet providers in the local area. Alternatively, students could have the option of getting third-party high-speed service to supplement the baseline service provided by the university.

Basically, people in university residences should have access to decent bandwidth, but it doesn't necessarily need to be provided automatically.

I just installed Fedora Core 4 and 5 (see below) on my daughter's Winbook W235 http://www.winbook.com/notebooks/w/w_overview.html . This is a very nice machine for $900 with a wide screen, DVD writer, 512M, and an 80G drive. It uses an Intel motherboard with the 855GM graphics adapter and 2200 wifi. As you note you'll need to install the Intel firmware, either from Livna http://rpm.livna.org/ or directly from Intel's site on Sourceforge http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php. Once I had the firmware installed, I could configure the wireless card with the included utilities in GNOME or KDE, and I didn't have to play with ndiswrapper or any other kludge.

The screen is more problematic. The 855 (and later 900+) adapters support a number of resolutions, but they weren't recognized by the normal drivers. The screen on this machine is 1280x768, but an out-of-the-box install forced it to 1024x768 which resulted in very ugly fonts. Luckily there's a little utility out there called 855resolution http://perso.wanadoo.fr/apoirier/ that you can load in rc.local and kick the adapter into other modes. Once I installed that, the KDE "Display" control saw the new resolution, and the Fedora desktop looked as nice as the Windows one.

We don't play games on this machine (we're both console types), so I can't speak for its graphics performance. It works great with Xine, though; movies and anime in the widescreen aspect ratio look terrific. Since I run KDE, I use the arts drivers to handle sound; they work fine.

OK, now for the big problem. FC4 installed just fine off the DVD, but FC5 would not install at all. (I've filed a bug report with the Fedora folks.) I finally installed FC5 by installing FC4 first, then running a system upgrade from the FC5 repositories http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq. This worked fine; it just added a few hours to the installation since yum had to update a couple thousand RPMs.

Finally, here's a hint if you buy a laptop like this one with Windows pre-installed. First, download and boot a copy of the Knoppix live CD or DVD http://www.knopper.net/. Once it's up and running, run "qtparted" from the command prompt. This is a nice graphical frontend to parted that will allow you to resize your partitions without having to buy something like Partition Magic. If you've used the Windows partition at all, I'd recommend running its disk optimizer to push all the Windows files to the front of the partition. Then you can lop off a chunk at the back for Linux.

The real barrier to Linux adoption is the BSA (business software alliance) that sues any high school that sets up a Linux lab. Microsoft recently announced that it was "dnagerous" to buy a PC without a licensed Microsoft OS.

The real solution is to shoot the bastards, but we have a temprorary fix: http://www.knopper.net/

Knoppix Linux allows us little people to demonstrate Linux to our students in (almost) complete safety. Microsoft and the BSA still get their protection money, and we get to boot off a DVD to demonstrate Linux. It recognized keychain drives, and saves your desktop settings to any decently sized secondary storage (e.g., 256mb keychain drive, CF card, or SD card.)

I'm a college professor, and I'm handing out hundreds of Knoppix DVDs every week to local high schools to spread cpomuter literacy amoung out incoming freshmen.

Andy Out!

Easy to use/install
Knoppix
SLAX
OpenSuSE

First Time User Tips
The first thing a Windows User should do is find a BootDisk and boot to a Command Prompt. (This the screen is all black and the mouse doesn't work.) You'll need to use that big piece of plastic that came with your computer called a "Key-Board". Type in word 'fdisk' , then hit the enter button and the follow the instructions to 'clean' your hard-drive. Doing this will clean up all of the extra files that computer doesn't need.
OR
Before you start the computer open the cd tray and place the OpenSuSE cd in it. Feel free to use any tools you can find to pry the cd try open. Close the tray and start the computer. Once the application starts it will guide you through Updating the Operating System (The Windows).
Good Luck.

http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

...and I host my domains through http://www.joker.com/

I don't know. I like having access to foreign sites, even if they aren't in English. What if I'm an foreign expatriot living in America, desiring access to my country's news, or blogs in my native language? Ubuntu Linux for overseas folks? Or companies that want to market to the whole world, not just the US?

A partitioned Internet sounds like a bad idea to me.

" What is KnoppMyth?

* Short Answer: KnoppMyth is Knoppix optimized for MythTV.
* Long Answer: Our vision is a distribution that makes it trivial to setup a set-top box.
We've included everything that believe is needing to reach this goal.
And, in fact, the developers use this distribution on their own PVR's.

What is Knoppix?

* See http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

What is MythTV?

* See http://mythtv.org/
Cool! So does this run completely from the CD?

* No. You can use the CD as a frontend, but KnoppMyth must be installed to the hard drive.
Will it ever run completely from the CD?
* Maybe. "

So you can't test it unless you install it.

I believe the OP was asking about a live cd that had a hard drive install as an option.

Move along.

Or, if you just wanna play, download Knoppix and be a Linux user tonight!

Nice idea, from Ubuntu. But they are certainly not the first. Of course, there is Knoppix , which runs Live from a CD. It might be made ready for USB stick also. And there are other distributions that fit on and are build for a 128Mb USB stick; for instance 'Damn Small Linux' ( DSL ), which only takes 50Mb of space...

Everybody can just run Knoppix and be let it take care of hardware!

"what's the best KDE-centric desktop distro now"

The only one I know of is Knoppix, but it's a live CD, and not typically installed like SuSE is.

http://www.knopper.net/

Knoppix now has a DVD version (3GB download).

Btw, did anyone hear of Linus's attempt to copyright Linux? Does anyone even make a second glance at that incident? Or are you trolls too busy bashing Microsoft to notice or care? Because after all, you can be a hypocrite as long as you are doing it against Microsoft.

I thought it was stupid, and bitched about it in my journal here, and gloated about the ruling earlier this morning here.

I also notice that they tried to spin the ruling, but that it doesn't work. One of the original "talking points" was to prevent people from using the term linux in connection with, for example, porn, a la "linuxporn". Now they're pointedly ignoring that one of the consequences of this ruling is that anyone can go and make a "linuxporn" (whatever that would be - I'm sure it would be at least as popular as Lesbian GNU/Linux).

This was a dumb move, and it failed. But back to your problem - have you tried a copy of the knoppix 4.0 dvd? Or SuSE 9.3? It's neat watching it boot off an external usb dvd.

Patents and paranoia are bad arguments to make consumers turn their living rooms into "DRM Detention Centers" - and even pay for their own prisons.

You can vote with your wallet. don't buy this crap. (...)

That is the power we hold. It is the ONLY voice we have as consumer and it is the most powerful one.

Wouldn't it be better to boot with a live linux distro such as knoppix and save your session to a reasonable sized USB memory stick? You would be using a much more powerful computer and it would cost about one sixth the price.

You boot off of the net. Most PCs these days have support for it. Linux works real well that way. I've run classrooms off of one knoppix CD, using the Knoppix Terminal Server (penguin menu -> services -> Start KNOPPIX Terminal Server). Takes all of a couple of minutes to start up. No need even for disk drives (although swap space is sometimes nice).

When Microsoft tries to FUD about 'difficult installs for Linux', they're obviously doing their damndest not to look at things like Knoppix -- The hardest thing is setting the BIOS to boot off of the NIC.

That boatload of search/replace stuff might be able to be replaced with a perl/sed/awk script.

If you're in an all-Windows shop, you can always load up knoppix to do that part -- or set aside 10 MB to do a desktop install of your favorite distro (knoppix is, once again an option) and dual boot. Better yet, just find an old machine in some storage room, somewhere that you can assign to the task.

Guess what?
Knoppix is German.
Yeah, you heard it right.
Knoppix is a project of Dipl.-Ing. Klaus Knopper, currently working and living in.. Germany!

http://www.knopper.net/knopper/

As such, his personal AIM screen name and password are never typed in, so the onlything key-loggers will catch is his conversations, which are mostly uninteresting.

If he wants to do any financial transactions or login to secure systems, he carries a Knoppix CD with him. He reboots the system and lets it load the OS from CD. No changes to the hard drive are performed, and he can be sure that there are no software-based processes watching what he types in. He can browse and use ssh without worry.

In my opinion, very clever.

Don't forget you can still download knoppix directly from any of the mirrors

• To kill "unkillable" Processes, use pskill from sysinternals.com. Also try pslist instad of the taskmanager to list the processes. The taskmanager does not give you all the information you might want to know, like many other tools from Redmond.
• Try to kill a whole bunch of suspicious processes at once, so that no part of the malware has a chance to restart another process. Again, pskill can do this.
• Boot another system, preferably one that can not execute EXEs, DLLs and so on: Get Knoppix or some other CDROM-based Linux (that is able to write NTFS if you use NTFS for Windows). Use it to browse the WWW, especially to search information about the malware. Use it to delete all executable files (*.EXE, *.DLL, *.OCX, ...) of the malware. (Malware registry entries should be harmless if all executables of the malware are deleted.) If you use Knoppix, this is not much harder than deleting files using Windows. You just have to find the right harddrive partition (usually hda1) containing windows and mount it read-write (use the right mouse button on the hdd icon). The real hard job is to find each and every executable of the malware.
• Disconnect the network plug / modem / isdn / whatever, switch off WLAN router, etc., before you boot windows to prevent the remaining parts of the malware to re-install itself from the net.
• Re-enable network only for the time you run Knoppix on the machine, until you are really, really sure that there are no traces left from the malware.

Oh hey, I remember you now! Hey, did you every try it out? It's at this site! Hurry and download it, because remember...

I know where you shop.
(Insert quiet psychopathic stare here.)

(You do know I'm kidding right? I don't know you...)

Try Knoppix - http://www.knopper.net/

If the customer is interested in going further I explain that they will have to expend either time or money to install and set up a custom Linux distribution.

All this nonsense simply because flippin Microsoft make every user an administrator by default. The're irresposible nutters who should either be thrown in the slammer, or commited to an asylum. Don't consort with them, or you'll get corrupted.

versions up to 3.7 are here, but the 3.8 isn't available yet.

Remember to sanitize the disks before you do this. The easiset way is to boot into something like Knoppix and running something like "shred /dev/hda". If you don't want to trash partition and bad-block info, /proc/partitions will list the available partitions that you can trash individually.

There have been a few cases in the past where people bought boxes off of ebay and found 'interesting' info on the drives (including internal bank databases). Remember that just deleting the files or doing a high-level format only clears the descriptors but leaves the raw data in place.

Is Linux really, truly, more secure that Windows? or does Linux have the same problems as similar M$ products but because of the lower market share, the problems don't get the same publicity?

It is ... inheritably way more secure.
Even Sun Microsystems (a competitor) acknowledges that.
Most Unix-systems are ..

Goes without saying even Microsoft uses Linux webservers (akamai) to fend off DOS attacks to their site.

If Linux surpasses Windows in market share, how long before the adware/spyware/malware/virus/pop-up writers start coding for Linux?

That will take a long time because Linux is not so easily exploitable. There is a bureacracy of permissions, policies and layer restrictions in Linux that makes the environment quite hostile for such exploits. That can also be offputting for the user.

Nothing is impossible but :
1. It would take extremely talented hackers to write such malwares.
2. Whatever exploit holes appear they should be closed almost immediately unlike what happens with Microsoft.

The commercialization not the popularization of Linux could make it less secure. Because people prefer to double-click executables rather than going through a whole series of procedures to install the application.

Best advice is to try a live-CD such as Knoppix or Slax for yourself.

Don't believe anything you read (pro or anti Linux) - but try and research for yourself.

In order to be sure the computer worked in the first place, they had to install Windows to test the peripherals and other devices!

That may have been an excuse in 1999, but Knot anymore.

KNOPPIX 3.7 has just been released

Crank up your torrents!

For those who don't already know, (quoting the site), "KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it."

I know what you mean. I'm 15, I took a while to work it all out.

I read "Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours", which worked fairly well for me, and directed me towards the appropriate *nix utilities, as well as Windows.

If you haven't already tried it, have a go with Linux. Maybe start with Knoppix and then move to Mandrake or Fedora. And then, if you're feeling adventurous, try Gentoo.

Setting up with Linux taught me more about working with computers than anything else.

Experience is better than any book that I've read.