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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'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