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Running Unix Entirely from CD?

Posted by Cliff on from the if-it-can-be-done-with-floppies dept.

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.

4 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Gentoo by iangoldby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. The best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Bootable Dedicated Game Servers by RevAaron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  4. Done it with OpenBSD by DieNadel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!