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MandrakeMove Bootable Linux CD Announced

Posted by simoniker on from the penguin-and-waddle dept.

joestar writes "MandrakeSoft just announced the release of the MandrakeMove release candidate, a special desktop version of the Mandrake Linux distribution that boots live from the CD and uses a USB key (included in the retail version) to automatically store personal data. It looks a bit like Knoppix, but comes with more features, such as the capability to eject the MandrakeMove CD-ROM during its use, in order to read audio or video files from another CD! The download release candidate is available here."

8 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Great for schools by PPGMD · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The biggest problem schools seem to have would be kids messing with the system. Using MandrakeMove (or the first major one Knoppix), from a read only source (such as a compact flash card), and require the kids to have a USB Key (or another compact flash card).

    Might be the future of school PCs, or at least computers that are open to the public without a login.

    1. Re:Great for schools by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      that's a good idea... to make them really resistant to vandalism or misconfiguration, you could simply remove the hard drive entirely and run them off the bootable cdrom. When it's time to upgrade, burn the new cd and you're set.

      spend the money on saved hard drives on more ram

    2. Re:Great for schools by ender81b · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah for linux desktops this would be a great idea since, currently, there really is no solution equivalent to deep freeze for windows/mac os X. Brielfy, deep freeze is a godsend that basically creates a static image that you can do whatever the hell you want to and all changes are gone at reboot. It's absoultely fantastic if you are administering a lab or lots of public computers as it allows you to not have to lock up a computer at all and still not worry about anybody messing the sytem up. Saves so many headaches and students love it since they get a full computer they can install/change however they want while I don't have to worry about crappy security programs or kiosk modes.

      This cd would give the same sort of functionality to Linux based labs that has been missing. Of course, personally, I would like to see some sort of open source deep freeze program but.. what the heck. Close enough ;).

  2. price by bach_m · · Score: 1, Insightful

    i think it'd be useful to know the price (obviously for the USB key) and size of the key. and perhapse a tentative release. sure, its RC1, but the final could be in a while

  3. Great!! by c_oflynn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Live CD's are great IMHO.

    Perfect for showing people Linux, or recovering another system (especially a Windows system, because it introduces them to Linux ;-)

    The whole USB idea is pretty good as well, good way to do stuff w/o touching the hard drive at all.

  4. Re:Why a USB key? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    it's hard to figure out how to write to something when you don't have all the information about how it works and no one will tell you.

  5. Re:DVD... by gnu-generation-one · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "why don't do a Linux DVD Live distro? ..just wondering."

    Chug...

    Chug...

    Status bar on Openoffice splash screen illuminates another pixel...

    Windows user: "is Linux always this slow?"

  6. You can't have it all by InodoroPereyra · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Instead of modding you as overrated, I will answer some missconcceptions.

    Ok, you can't have it all. As you mentioned: your non-geeks friends and family are having fun with Mandrake. However you want to install and compile things, and Gentoo is more like what you want. Cool again. That's what free software is all about, freedom and choices.

    But this needs to be clarified:

    I see Mandrake now at a very delicate point, getting each day more and more like proprietary OSes, hiding a lot of stuff from the user (even thought the tools and the utililities are open source they sometimes choose ways that are non-standards).

    This is inaccurate. First of all, Mandrake is much, much, much closer to debian or whatever distro you could think of, than it is to proprietary OS's. You get the damn source, period Also: Mandrake is LSB (standards) compliant. Another period ;-)

    Now, what you propably would agree with me, is that Mandrake has become too agressive in their customization of free software packages, and this includes the kernel. IMHO, they would be much better off shipping vanilla packages plus a minimal set of patches. Take for instance the kernel, they should (IMHO) jus add supermount, and add the third-party modules as they do, and that should be it. All of this on top of the latest vanilla stable kernel.

    If you follow cooker or read the changelogs in their RPMS, you'll notice that they spend a lot of energy backporting things from development branches for several packages. Notably, they do it with the kernel. This precious time would be much better invested on improving their own tools, which as you said, have some flaws, but as you also said, give you overall a great distro working out of the box.

    In the end, even when mandrake can be improved, you have to realize that you can't have it all. You either put a lot of your own time on building your customized distro from scratch (or a la gentoo), or you take a distro that does it for you, and yes, it will make some decisions for you. It is your choice, enjoy freedom ;-)