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Four Linux Live CDs, The Executive Summary
prostoalex writes "ExtremeTech published a review of 4 Linux live distributions that do not require installation and run off a CD. Knoppix, Feather Linux, Gnoppix and MEPIS Linux were researched, with Knoppix winning the competition (and Gnoppix not graded, since it's still in beta)." One more (of the seemingly infinite number of live distros) I've recently tried and been happy with is called Slax, and is what it sounds like -- a live Slackware distribution. Slax worked great with my finicky older Toshiba laptop. (However, slax.org appears to be down.)
Im surprised they left out Damn Small Linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/). It packs a complete desktop package in 50 megs. This includes:
browser
word processor
email client
picture viewer
image editor
file manager
instant messenger
spreadsheet
PDF viewer
mp3 / cdplayer
irc client
ssh clients games
sql database
web server
vncviewer
nintendo emulator..
really knoppix packs a lot of stuff, but do you need it all? 50 megs will fit on an infamous "business card cd"
There's 4 Official 'Flavors' of Morphix including:
In addition to those 4 Official 'Flavors' there's quite a few Derivitves including ones for HAM Radio users and a MAME system.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The poster mentions Slax, and its website being down: It is currently accessible at http://slax.linux-live.org/ but not for long..
The great thing about Linux (as far as home users go) is the number of 'free' games and utilities installed by default. It's something to play around with.
People aren't going to install Linux and jump into a spreadsheet for the boss - they want to stuff around - and that's whats good; there are a heap of small games and odd utilities to keep the newbie amused for a reasonable amount of time.
With the live CDs, this is a great way to show home users *easily* what sort of stuff is installed for FREE with Linux.
Now, if there was just an easy way for them to access their Outlook email...
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
I followed these instructions on the Linux Journal site to create a Fedora and RedHat 9 based live CD:
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7233
Only sticking point was the initial partition. I tried with a loopback mounted ISO but there were permission problems. Then went to a NFS mounted share. It worked but required a second machine. Finally just stuck another drive inside and created a bunch of 700M partitions.
http://kano.mipooh.net/kanotix/
i x/T IX-X-MAS-2003- PREVIEW.iso.torrent
It is made by a german Knoppix hacker named Kano, who has a big page of patches for Knoppix here:
http://www.kano.mipooh.net/
It comes with kernel 2.4.23 patched with forcedeth and XFS.
It uses grub, Xfree86 4.3, is based on Debian/sid.
ACPI and DMA enabled by default (can be disabled with acpi=off respectively nodma)
The forum (german and english):
http://kanotix.mipooh.net/index.php
Download:
http://debian.tu-bs.de/knoppix/kanot
Torrent:
http://kano.mipooh.net/kanotix/KANO
Try www.knoppix.de, seems still to work (for how long is the question though)
As for getting knoppix to do the same, it's just a matter of adding a home=/dev/sda1 (or your actual pendrive location) parameter during startup.
It could be that this is automated/autodetected with mandrake though.
If only I could come up with a good sig
You've got to be careful with those mini CDs. I got a copy of Damn Small Linux on a Business Card CD stuck inside the CD-ROM drive behind the tray. This went on to break the whole CD rom drive and probably the CD.
If you are going to write to the harddrive, it might as well be a full featured Linux distro, such as SuSE or RedHat. Why the hell not?
/read only/ - so you cannot possibly install crap on it, or corrupt/delete system files, etc. I don't know how stuff like home dirs work (as I've not used Knoppix personally), but at the very least you can't mess up the system for other people.
Because the Knoppix image is
doing stuff in English hardly qualifies as internationalization.
No - internationalisation is the process by which you prepare an application to be localised. Localisation means using icons, images, text, etc that is appropriate for a given country/culture. Internationalisation means making these things configurable - ie having text strings, image paths, etc come out of a config file, instead of being hard-coded. It is localisation that requires translators, but internationalisation needs to take account of things like direction of writing (right-left or left-right), what colours should be configurable (red in some countries is lucky, not danger/warning), etc. You need people from other cultures to point these things out, or you may miss something, and create an application that can only be partially localised.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You can download Knoppix with BitTorrent here, it should be faster than FTP.
Before the knoppix server dies, here's the tracker for the bittorrent so everyone can download knoppix.
here for the bittorrent client.
Also, MandrakeMove torrent
I do it already. With Knoppix 3.3 theres a program that will make a permanent home directory. Point it at your USB key drive at boot and you are laughing.
"knoppix home=/dev/sda1 screen=1280x1024"
If you figure out how to edit the ISO (I'm guessing loopback device) you could even get the CD to do this automatically.
Kurumin and Kalango (yeah, like I was going to give the links... lamer!).
;-D
They're pretty much Knoppix adaptations, knoppix options still present and all, but an interesting fact:
Some small VARs here sell computers without OSes and they demo their computers with Kurumin, which not only eases the selling process (try telling your customer to believe the computer will work), but also require much less work, since there's no installing to do... and more importantly, no uninstalling, too!
Kinda of a frightening experience, to see Linux in TV... to M$, of course!
Given the high chance of hardware incompatibilities when installing linux on laptops, linux live cds are fantastic for laptops. You boot the live cd, fiddle with the options, and see if the hardware you care about works (eg., display, external display, ethernet, wireless, etc.). If not, you try another distribution. I tried knoppix, gnoppix, morphix, as well as straight debian on my ibm t40p. Only knoppix was able to get everything working. After I got it working, I installed it to the harddrive. The biggest problems with knoppix are (1) it uses kde instead of gnome and (2) it has its own package structure that is incompatible with debian. So apt-get dist-upgrade or even apt-get upgrade will break everything. I've only had success upgrading individual packages with apt.
while it doesn't seem to use all of the most advanced technologies that Knoppix provides, which makes load times slightly longer, Gnoppix is rather good, and as far as user experience goes it really outdoes Knoppix with the GNOME desktop.
Software Freedom Day!.
See for yourself.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Although I haven't used it myself it is what the slax distribution was created with.
To quote from their website:
"Linux Live is a set of bash scripts which allows you to create own LiveCD from every Linux distribution. Just install your favourite distro, remove all unnecessary files (for example man pages and all other files which are not important for you) and then download and run these scripts. "
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Straight from boot from the CD, Knoppix can use something like 6 or 7 different GUIs, including KDE, Gnome, IceWM, FluxBox, and more.
That's a useful capability that's often overlooked-- On an older machine of mine, running Knoppix in KDE-mode was pretty slow, but it ran fast as anything in FluxBox mode.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
A normal Linux installation is also read-only, for non-root users. It's probably not quite as bulletproof as a mounted read-only disk image, but I believe that FHS-compliant distributions should always work with /usr/ mounted read-only, at least.
If there are things an unprivileged user can do to screw up the system, they are normally security holes, and should be fixed. (Not saying they don't exist - read-only mounts can still be useful if you are really paranoid.) (One thing you might worry about is hitting the reset button and corrupting the disk - a CD-ROM is certainly immune to that, though journalling filesystems should be robust against it too.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Actually, MandrakeMove mounts the hard drives just fine. The beta had icons on the desktop for it, but they took them out for the final (which I think is good). Over the holidays I used MandrakeMove on PC's of friends and family, and it worked very well, got much done. It's slick, fast (!), Just Works (TM).
Yes, MandrakeMove is a glaring omission.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
The next version of jollix (to appear in 2nd quarter) will include kernel 2.6.1, kde3.2.j ollix/
http://www.jollix.de
It has german language support only so far but our scripts to build the liveCD are available via CVS: http://cvs.berlios.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jollix/
Most of the bash-script comments and utility-documentation (cloop, mkisofs) is in english.
There's a guide to remastering Knoppix that could help. I mean, while you're at it, you might as well tweak the application set.
boot: knoppix tohd
and the cd was copied to a folder c:\knoppix on the
win 98 fs. I use a boot disk, and now do not need the CD at all. I restore from a Memory Stick, and have MozillaFirebird, about 10 mb of files in a tarball on the usb stick. There is a menu item in fluxbox for DSL that automatically installs Mozilla Firebird and Flash 5. When done, all you have to do is edit your filetool.lst on the stick to have all that backed up.
It's fast and stable, and the scite editor included is way better than gnotepad for editing html pages for my web site. Right now, I am using the glinks web browser, which has to be seen to be believed. It is much better than dillo, but of course no match for Moz 7.
Big problem in moving my CD and stick around to various machines. Modem has to be reconfigured with #wvdialconf wvdial.conf, and of course you might not be able to get X to run.
One can start with "knoppix 2" to start in text mode and work up from there.
I installed on the HDD as I wanted more speed, and got a little tired of having the cdrom drive spin, although it's not really that bad, I just wanted more...
This setup runs almost as fast as my P4 2.8 1GB XP box, but not quite. It's not slow by any means.
One idea is to back up to a second memory stick (remove the original) then if your stick pulls a "mars lander" item on the flash memory, you still have your stuff.
I have my menu file(yes, I changed it) on the 'net at:
fluxbox_menu so you can see what this litttle distro has. I have not added anything but Moz 7 to it, yet. As you can see this setup is stable enough to make this post, using Slashdot's online "comment box", with the corrections, and additions one must make. There is no "paste" in glinks, that I could find, so I couldn't just write this in scite, and paste it here.
Probably your roommate hadn't applied the OS X update which installed a broken firmware, incompatible with linux.
:-)
Current livecds should be compatible
I once tried SuSE Live (I think it was version 7.0, but I don't remember). It didn't work.
You sure do know what you're writing about... Actually, knoppix works more than fine. When my university was hosting the particle physics conference of the national phyisical society, we set up two "internet cafes", one featuring ordinary PCs, the other a bunch of notebooks, all running knoppix with no problems. And that was a year ago. I used knoppix when I bought my notebook, which came without windows preinstalled, but I wanted to see it worked before I took it home, so trusting in God or whoever else is responsible for making things work, I just popped in the knoppix CD and bootet the computer. Actually, I was an idiot and didn't see the pixel failure in the middle of the screen, but I won't blame that on knoppix ;-)
If you want to have a gnome desktop from a live CD, try the Morphix Gnome module. Last time I downloaded it, it worked nicely, definitely better than Gnoppix. This distro's work seems to have been interrupted for a while but they are just reemerging from the sort-of-dead.
Ask and ye shall receive!/ 01/10/1940 217.shtml
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/04
Er, no... perhaps the site has simply Moved
Knoppix is okay, but I really like having a very usable distro on one of those 185mb cd's. The small cd's actually fit in your pocket (typically of my coat) so I can have a useable linux distro wherever I go, AND it works on old hardware (read: PC's that can't boot off of usb keys).
I don't have a laptop at work (don't travel enough to warrant the expense) but when I do travel, I usually end up having to "borrow" someone's PC when they aren't using it. This is pain to say the least. It is great to say: "hey, let me just use that old junky one in the corner." They usually respond: oh, you can't use that one, the hard drive is broken. Which is when I say "Perfect!", and they give me this very strange look....
That said, slax is the only 'small' distro I've found that includes the utilities I need:
1. dhcp
2. Web browser that supports ssl AND PROXIES!!! (most small distros use the dillo web browser, which does not support proxies. Without proxy support, I can't get outside the corporate firewall, which sort of makes it hard to read slashdot.)
3. ssh
4. multi-desktop window manager [click to focus] (yes, I started on windows, flame me...)
5. vnc viewer
6. reasonably workable xterm (konsole and rxvt are my favorites)
Also nice about slax is that is has full PCMCIA support. When I've used it on laptops (belonging to other people, of course) I've been able to use PCMCIA network cards (10/100 and some wireless cards) and it supports flash memory (so I can copy over my ssh keys). I love to have these features in one of those 50mb business card distro's, but they never seem to include a functional web browser, and do include a bunch of utilities I don't care about.
(sigh) I guess I'll have to build my own distro, if I only knew how/had the time to learn...
Until then, however, slax is the best distro I've found for what I need.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned Textar's PCLinuxOS project yet. It's based on Mandrake 9.2 plus Texstars enhancements.
You can find more info here: PCLinuxOS Homepage
It's still early in development but looks really promising! They just released Preview 5 on the 20th.
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
It's not entirely down, slax.linux-live.org
Slax is by far the best live-CD I've used, keep up the good work (fits on a 20 min / 8 cm cd too).
It' s also a rather pointless excersise. A normal Knoppix HD install is faster, can be updated through the apt-get update/upgrade routine and it also cannot be damaged when using non-root accounts (as you should).
Well, there are other considerations here. I wanted this to be set up in such a way as to demand as little of my time as possible, which the Knoppix image approach achieves. I was also concerned about liability... had I done a normal install, then I would be root, and then I would conceivably be liable for any exploits performed on that machine. Remember that this isn't my day job by any stretch of the imagination; this is me doing a favor.
And I'm not sure I buy the notion that a default install is secure simply because you're making your users use non-root accounts. I've heard of too many exploits that take advantage of local access to the box.
You failed your users because you didn't offer them a solution which fitted with *their* expectations.
Again, they really aren't *my* users. This was supposed to be about me spending less than an hour slapping the thing together and maybe visiting once a month to see if it was still running when I go to pay my rent. I was getting nothing in return from this arrangement, so considering that their alternative was wrestling with a barely-limping Win98 install, I think I did well by them.
Now, had I gotten into the second-stage of the project, that is, getting into all the i18n crap, then yeah, I'd have gone for the full install and would've worked out some indemnity arrangement with the manager's office.
Just one more note... once the system was booted and Konqueror was running in full screen mode the system was actually quite responsive. Most of the users were interested only in doing webmail and assorted browsing, and what was truly remarkable was how they didn't notice or care that it wasn't an IE box, despite (I'm assuming) that being their only previous experience. I think the people who were upset with the performance was management, because they had to turn on the machine in the morning and I guess waiting three minutes for everything to load was just too much. So, I think it really depends on the situation you're in... with just the slightest change in environment--like if they left the machine on all night for instance--it would have probably been a successful setup.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
http://kano.mipooh.net/kanotix/
- PREVIEW.iso.torrent
It is made by a german Knoppix hacker named Kano, who has a big page of patches for Knoppix here:
http://www.kano.mipooh.net/
It comes with kernel 2.4.23 patched with forcedeth and XFS.
It uses grub, Xfree86 4.3, is based on Debian/sid.
ACPI and DMA enabled by default (can be disabled with acpi=off respectively nodma)
The forum (german and english):
http://kanotix.mipooh.net/index.php
Download:
http://debian.tu-bs.de/knoppix/kanotix/
Torrent:
http://kano.mipooh.net/kanotix/KANOTIX-X-MAS-2003
look here (it's about Knoppix, though)p pix-usb/
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/kno
Then he tried it, what he found was that by enabling the USB Legacy device option (and/or USB Keyboard or Mouse option) it could be used to boot.
If the knoppix live cd is too slow, maybe they could try starting fluxbox or icewm instead of the default KDE. On a slower computer, Knoppix on CD with KDE is utterly hopeless but fluxbox is okay (in my experience).
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
You can build your own distro, and not to evangelize but PCLinuxOS 2k4 makes it easy.
Basically you setup the distro the way you want it, apt-get rpms via synaptic (yes that's right, apt-get and rpm in the same sentence), setup all your bookmarks, address books, etc. Then you run the mklivecd shell script and voila! Your own distro, with everything you want and need and nothing you don't.
Go to pclinuxonline.com and hunt down the left side for the pclinuxos download link and forums link.
The 2nd disk of the Slackware box set is (and has been for a number of years now) a "live" disc suitable for use as a recovery/rescue disc. I've used it for years with great success before KNOPPIX was even a gleam in a German engineer's eye.
Quite a few folks would ask me "why can't Win98 do that?" as I was booting up their crapped out machines and recovering whole HDDs worth of files. All in all, a very nice bonus from a rock-solid distribution.
The genius that is Patrick Volkerding...
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