Kernel 2.6 Live CD From Gentoo

killergreen writes "I know some of us (myself in particular) really dig LiveCDs for work (some make fantastic diagnostic and/or security tools) or play. Well,here's one that incorporates the 2.6 kernel for experementation."

Comments

Knoppix is closed...

[Kulic]

From the site:

Closed because of "Software-Patents"

In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That way, software developers will have to pay the "software-patentholders" for using these features, even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can completely stall the development of innovative software for small and medium companies. Apart from this, the expense for patent inquiries and legal assistence is high, for even trying to find out if the self-developed software is possibly violating "software-patents", if you want to continue to market your software. Contrary to real patents, "software-patents" are, in the current draft, monopolization of business ideas and methods, even without any tangible technical implementation.
More about the current major problem at http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html

Re:Knoppix is closed...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Wake up and smell the kibble. Read the whole thing and they tell you where to go.

That's truly cool because.....

[Sevn]

I've REALLY been looking at one of THESE for a while and this kinda just helped me make up my mind.

Experimental

[Anonymous Coward]

It must REALLY be experimental given that experementation is mispelled.

First of all

[Apreche]

This is so a couple weeks ago. Second of all, gentoo LiveCDs aren't like knoppix or those other ones. Most of the time they are used to install a permanent gentoo installation. You just boot off of them to get to the first stage and to start compiling your gentoo system. The real reason this is awesome, is this allows you to mount Serial ATA drives, since 2.6 finally supports them. If I am correct this is the first major linux distribution that has real support for being able to install onto serial ata drives because of this disc. And you can bet it's going to be freakin' awesome.

Re:First of all

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just installed RH Fedora Core 1 onto SATA disks direct from CD. LVM on raid1 :)

It has a 2.4.22-1 kernel.

Re:First of all

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. I have had my Gentoo installation installed on my serial ATA drive for months, and it is running a 2.4 kernel with no patches.

Re:First of all

[Hypocritical Guy]

This is so a couple weeks ago.

That's nice, but this is the first time I heard about this. In fact I've been interested in a 2.6 live CD for a while, just haven't looked for one. This saves me the time. I find it very useful to know that you are way ahead of Slashdot in news acquisition.

Second of all, gentoo LiveCDs aren't like knoppix or those other ones.

Really? I tried one and it totally reminded me of Knoppix. I got the one with Gnome and KDE, and it booted into Gnome and had many of your typical apps available to run.

Re:First of all

[killergreen]

Yup, I admit,it's a couple of weeks old. I've been offline for a little bit, and had just caught up on my reading. Saw the post at gentoo.org just last night, and thought I'd share the info. Very glad to see that it helped at least a couple of people.

I run Gentoo on my home computer exclusively (did I spell that right? No spell checker here ;) ), and have found it to be "snappier" and more responsive than any other OS I've used. Including other distros. Anyone have benchmarks on various distros? That would be really good reading.

Second of all, gentoo LiveCDs aren't like knoppix or those other ones. Most of the time they are used to install a permanent gentoo installation. You just boot off of them to get to the first stage and to start compiling your gentoo system.

Apreche is mostly right here. For the most part, Gentoo LiveCDs are used as an installation media. However, you can get the Game CDs that have a full GUI, and I've personally found that the standard LiveCDs can be used to rescue a broken system in a pinch. I had to use one the other day to fix my borked RedHat server at work (my fault, I typo'd in grub.conf.)

And you can bet it's going to be freakin' awesome.

Couldn't agree more, Apreche

Re:First of all

[muckdog]

Redhat 9 (2.4 kernel) supports my serial ATA devices just fine. Although I'm not positive that the drivers are in the kernel source or not.

Re:First of all

[mickwd]

Mandrake also supports serial ATA drives, in both 9.1 and 9.2. I actually used Mandrake 9.1 to install Gentoo (as a dual-boot option).

Re:First of all

[surprise_audit]

...and have found it to be "snappier" and more responsive than any other OS I've used. Including other distros. Anyone have benchmarks on various distros?

OK, this isn't exactly an official benchmark, but I tried RedHat9 on my K6-2-450, full install. After installation, from hitting return in the gdm password box to KDE being ready to use took 1 minute and 35 seconds. With Gentoo installed from the pre-built GRP packages (i.e. not particularly optimised) the same PC did the same login-to-ready startup in 35 seconds.

This was not the very first login, either. In both cases I logged in a couple of times previous to the timed login. I even went back and reinstalled Redhat9 to make sure I hadn't bollixed the timing. It was still the same - 1minute 35seconds for Redhat, just 35seconds for Gentoo.

Oh, and I used the same kernel config to build a custom kernel in both distros, even the same partitions on the disk.

Re:First of all

[killergreen]

Which kernel are you using? I'm using the gaming kernel myself. I'm with you in that my response time is similar, but with everything I do... loading the desktop included.

With your hardware (not picking on you or "looking down" on it...I'm not a technosnob), you might want to try a more lightweight graphical environment, such as Fluxbox, WindowMaker, IceWM, or XFCE4. True, these are not actual desktop environments, but are definitely not as likely to eat up all your RAM. KDE is not well known for being easy on resources ;).

Re:First of all

[surprise_audit]

More to the point is that the hardware was the same for both distros... Ought to have been similar timings, no?

Kernel was probably 2.4.20, as this was a couple of months ago. Stock kernel source for RedHat, gentoo-sources for Gentoo.

Anyway, my other Linux boxes include an XP1900+/Radeon (at home) and a Sun E450 (quad Ultrasparc 400MHz) (at work).

I'm posting w/ 2.6 now!!

[spineboy]

I must say that they (Gentoo) have made it pretty easy to install. I've been using Linux for a year now as an end user (Mandrake and more recently Suse) and I found this easier to install than I thought it would be.

There are about 20 pages of instructions on howto install the system, which after I printed it out, was much easier than I thought it would be. There is a large selection of software available from their site (games, sys utils, etc) and the whole system makes installing them very easy. The time spent compiling the program is prolly about as much as I would spend looking for it (and dealing with RPM hell)....

Overall it feels very snappy/quick and very consistent (I was beginning to find Mandrake a little flaky after 2 years of using 'drake).

I dunno, I just like it. Pretty much everyone now has an extra 10 gig or so on their hard drives, and installing this (and the new 2.6 kernel!)is pretty fun.

Just gave it a try.

[Master Rux]

Only 73MB so it fit on a pocket cd, and sure enough it's a live CD alright. It booted me right up to a command line. It doesn't have a GUI. It has a textual and graphical version of links, so you can surf the web. Looks like it's just the basics.

Bit Torrent Link

[Kalak]

Since I'm up too late, and interested in a pure 2.6 distro to see if the 32 groups limit is really gone, I've gone Karma Whoring (and this is a pain in the @#$% way to do it).

Here is a torrent.

Re:Bit Torrent Link

[Anonymous Coward]

VT got their ass kicked by WVU, rox0r!

Gentoo UT 2003 Live-CD

[Wolfrider]

--Having just spent the better part of 1/2 hour looking for this iso - and finding dead links all over the web - I'll post the current link here for anyone looking for it. Beware - it will NOT RUN on a Riva TNT2 Nvidia card; latest docs specify at least a Geforce2 or better as the minimum requirement.

04-11-2003 iso:
http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu/experimental/x 86/gam ecd/