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Running Unix Entirely from CD?
Dasein asks: "I am working as a Tech Support Developer, and I had a wonderful idea a few months ago. After stumbling upon Trinux, I modified it so that I could run Linux on any PC with a floppy. By doing this, I was able to backup on our network valuable data on users' computers when their OS failed. This summer I wanted to develop a similar idea but this time with a CD. I was having trouble finding Linux/BSD distributions that could run solely off a CD, and I'm a bit scared to start one from scratch because I wouldn't know where to begin. Does anyone have any suggestions?" nik suggests: On the BSD front, there's the LiveCD project, which seems to do exactly what you want.
You mention Trinux in the article, which by default requires extra floppies or a network connection to work, it seems. Another great floppy-based "distro" is Tom's Root Boot. It's saved me several times. It has support for almost any device you could imagine, all packed on one floppy. Not quite a CD-based distro, but still very cool.
check out superrescue
I guess using that as a base, it wouldn't be too hard to create a bsd system or other.
If you still want to create your own system from scratch, isolinux is helpful. It takes care of the booting. The only other thing you would have to manage is to mount a ramdisk for /var and maybe /etc (anything that needs rw).
have fun :)
There are several distro's that can run from cd.
There's Demolinux, which is quite nice. It comes with gnome and kde and so.
There's the Linuxcare cd, which is like 100 or 200 Mb in size I believe.
There's also the Suse live evaluation cd, which I have no experience with. Suse also offers custom firewalls running from cd.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Demolinux (http://www.demolinux.org/) runs Linux + KDE/GNOME off a CD. It can optionally write to the hard drive in what they call an "anchor file".
/etc is a write-protected floppy disk, and all programs are loaded off CD-ROM.
Devil-Linux (http://www.devil-linux.org/) is a distribution targeted at servers with a need for security. The
I remember a Slashdot thread that I can't find about floppy-disk distros - some people chimed in about a Super-Rescue CD from kernel.org.
The Gentoo boot CDROM gives you a usable Linux system booting from CDROM. You can download the iso at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gen too/releases/build/1.2/gentoo-ix86-1.2.iso
I'm not sure how this differs (if at all) from Tom's Root Boot mentioned by 'djn' earlier. You may find this is all you need - burn the CD, insert and switch on computer.
Knoppix owns them all. It boots straight into KDE without asking questions, detects most other hardware automatically aswell and comes with an incredible amount of software ready to use.
I've also been looking for cd-only-linux-distro also and next one I'll try out is Mandrake 8.1 based Virtual-Linux
Gibraltar is a nice debian boot-from-CDrom/run-off-CDrom distribution geared towards firewalls.
Hope this helps
David
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
There is a system that boots from cd called Knoppix.
I never used it, but it seems to be quite mature and usable. It even uses swap partitions on the hdd, if there are any.
Regards,
mgk
I know that the 4cd sale version of Slackware Linux comes with a "Bootable live disc, the Ultimate Linux rescue and demo disc!" (as they describe it on the website). I've never actually tried it, but I've never had problems with slackware products.
I'd also like to run Linux off a CD, but my requirements are slightly different.
I have a (very) low-end laptop with a dead hard drive. It does not have the ability to boot of a CD, only a floppy. I would like to boot off the floppy and then root over to the CD. I would use it for a firewall, router, etc. I haven't been able to cram pcmcia pppd and the rest on just a floppy. So If I could utilize the CD I'd be home free.
Does anyone know if any of the above mentioned CD solutions support booting off a floppy?
This page has a tarball of scripts that let you take a running Debian system and make a Live-CD version of it.
Last time I used it, I managed to get a kernel and enough of a root filesystem together to run an MP3 player out of a ramdisk. With a full CD of space, you could do much, much more.
not linux but may as well mention it
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
www.linuxfromscratch.org - They'll be glad to help you desing your own setup and guide you through the steps required to run off of a read-only medium. Most of the info is in the hints archive, I believe.
SIG: HUP
I'm not a big gamer, but I've been to a handful of LAN parties.
Inevitably, at least at the ones I've been to, there is always someone spending half or a third of the day futzing with their spare machine to get a dedicated game server going. Which got me thinking... There are a bunch of these games with a dedicated server versions for Linux. Wouldn't it be sweet if you had, on a bootable CD, a barebones Linux install that booted straight into a pre-configured, and chock-full of maps, game server? You'd need a seperate CD for each game of course. Some games wouldn't even fit on a CD. Perhaps a bootable DVD is the answer? Or swapping CDs with 'mappacks?'
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
There was a similar article several months ago with a run down on the various floppy / cd based systems. It is probably well worth your while to check out that previous thread. I've seen a couple of good CD based ones around, especially the ones arranged such that they fit on a business card sized CD-R and hence provide you with the ability of a nice in wallet rescue disk. Checkout linuxcare's offering
There is a Diskless Nodes HOWTO which basically covers your question. It seems there are lots of Live Linux distributions out there but I have personally only tried a version of SUSE Live Linux, which worked well.
Zipslack (http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/) from Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/) may be a step in the right direction.
I've done it with OpenBSD. It's actually quite simple and easy to set up.
One thing I've found helpful was to do it first on a harddrive set only for this (trying to boot it, recompiling and all), and then burning the CD. The first time I tried it, I was making it on top of another intallation and that got me tunning the former installation, which had nothing to do with my intended CD, just to cleanly compile it all.
Take a look at this article and man mfs.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
Linux Weekly News's distribution list has several CD-based distros on it.
Take a look at this.
/dev/cdrom (with Linux, it's not that simple, but with Windows, it's impossible). I have created this toolkit because these single-floppy Linux systems have three major drawbacks: floppies are slow, errorprone and always too small.
From the web site: BBLCD is a toolkit for building your own bootable Linux CD from your favorite (and possibly customized) distribution. It is more or less an intelligent cp -a /
The current stable version is fully functional. I have tested it with SuSE 7.x, Red-Hat 7 and Debian 2.2. I have user reports that it also works with Red-Hat 6.2. In fact, it would surprise me if it didn't work with any distribution, but there are so many around, so you never know.
This one blew me away.
:)
Germans never cease to amaze me!
So go try knoppix now!
It's autodetection is incredible, you can save state/prefs to floppy between boots, and it's very VERY up-to-date.
Prisoner #655321
Have a look at the ClosedBSD web site. Fits the bill much like LiveCD does.
I recently used it to change permissions on a directory that got screwed up on a linux based NAS unit. I was very pleased.
Mormon news and discussion at Mahonri.org
I did something similar to this back in February, starting with Slackware, but it should be easy enough to use another distro. Basically, you use tmpfs for /etc, /var, /tmp, or whatever you want to be writable, and fill in the contents at boot time from static copies of those locations. Then you can just run the thing as usual.
/etc to start up, basically all you need to do is mount /etc /var /tmp, cp files in, and then start up normal system init, or whatever.
You'll need some custom init scripts that don't require
This isn't very detailed, but it should get the point across on how to go about implementing.
http://www.demolinux.org/ has a disto that boots from cd, and doesnt modify your hard drive.
There's this distribution:
http://www.lnx-bbc.org/
that is designed to fit in your wallet!
Knoppix is a very nice project:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
Doesn't anyone know how to use Google anymore?
Or has Ask Slashdot become "Ask Slashdot For Help Using a Search Engine"?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
As other posters have mentioned, this has been done lots of times. I did it myself back in the RedHat 5.2 days and had a nice little Network Computer that ran entirely off a CD. At the time, I started with diskettes from the Linux Router Project (LRP), but if I were doing it again today, I think I'd choose a project that already worked from a CD, to avoid reinventing stuff. Mindi Linux comes to mind. It is part of the Mondo Rescue porject and sounds like it is already close to what you are trying to accomplish.
The SuSE live evaluation CD is amazing! I ran my laptop, which also doubles as a home machine, of it for 2 weeks non-stop when the HD died. Every piece of HW in my laptop was supported. The only thing I had to do to make it usable for every day tasks was to create a user, and mount my $HOME over NFS from my home server. Granted, running KDE was just a bit slow, but that's to be expected when every file you read or write is located on another machine with only a 10Mbit ethernet connection between.
Seems to me that rescue disks always use a ramdisk for the root partition, /etc or /var on top of a
because you can't mount a read/write
read-only root. Am I missing something here?
I want to do the same thing with compact FLASH for various
embedded applications (the car MP3 player I want to build, etc.)
That is writeable but it has limited life, so it would be best to
mount it read-only most of the time.
Most of the comments have focused on rescue-type environments. If you want to make your own cd-based linux distro, check out The BBLCD Toolkit. It's the toolkit that was used to make the linuxcare bootable cd.
Basically, you set up a partition with a linux distro, customize it all you want, make sure it's smaller then 650M, and tell the program to burn it to a cd.