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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.)
Remember to tell people that before you evangelize them on Live CD's, or they'll come away thinking that it's Linux that's slow.
Sadly, it's a mistake I made at the apartment complex where I live. They have two computers connected via cable modem to the Internet for use by the residents. One's running Win2K, the other Win98. Needless to say, the Win98 machine started crapping out after every single piece of spyware on the planet was eventually installed. They knew I was into computers, so they asked me to take a look. I sold them on the idea of using a Live CD (Knoppix) on the premise that never again would they have to worry about residents screwing around with the system.
For awhile, this worked, but eventually people started getting frustrated. I think the speed in loading applications was the major factor (another was fear that one of the residents would walk away with the CD.) They've since gotten management to buy another copy of Win2K.
Yes, I failed it. I assumed that they would understand that since it was running from a CD, that the experience would be slower.
In hindsight, I should have exploited Knoppix's ability to be installed to the hard drive. It would have given them most of what they wanted, and it would've run at an acceptible speed.
(yes, I know, *all* Linuxes can be installed to the hard drive, but the Knoppix install is basically the CD image sitting on the hard drive as read-only, which for this application had its virtues.)
It's tragic in another sense... the apartment complex has a large number of people from all over the world who generally end up staying for relatively short periods of time, so their English isn't first rate. Good--and easy to use--i18n support would be a great help to many of them to be sure. I could have actually gotten interested in working on this aspect of Linux (really, KDE) as I've torn out quite a bit of hair trying to come to terms with this problem set, and having people who actually *use* foreign languages as my testers would have been invaluable, to say the least (I don't know a foreign language.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
"However, slax.org appears to be down."
Obviously the sysadmin for the slax.org webserver is some sort of psychic and chose to take the site down than receive a slashdotting.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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"
So, slax.org seems to have been slashdotted before the actual story was posted? Hmmm, I'd say that's a rather curious temporal anomaly? :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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 speed of live CDs is becoming less of an issue as RAM sizes get larger. On my 512Mb notebook, Knoppix runs just fine.
What I find more interesting than "standard Linux on a CD" is the concept of packaging a specific application along with a live CD. For example, the systemrescueCD boots up and gives a good set of tools for doing backups/restores of your disks.
What works for backup/restore also works for games, demos, even large-scale applications that do not require intensive local data storage. The advantage of a live CD based on something like Knoppix is that it will run on practically any PC out there, booting in less time than it would normally take to install and configure.
There is little reason why a lot of software should be hard-installed onto PCs, and many reasons why it's a pain in lots of cases.
The counter argument is that "yes, but I want to be able to switch back from my game to my other applications." But this ignores the huge market for single-purpose kiosk-style systems, in home, in shops, and in business.
I would estimate that 30% or more of all PCs run only a few specific applications, and that most of the future expansion is into kiosk-style areas where live CDs are a perfect answer.
Why is this interesting? Because Linux has a significant lead in this technology mainly thanks to Knoppix. Thus a large part of Linux's future growth may well come from a native technology, which is much nicer than trying to win market share by imitating Windows.
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The article only seems to mention using these distros as a means to introduce oneself easily to Linux. While this is an obvious use of Linux-on-CD type distros, it's by no means the only one. Personally, I've found these things to be fast enough for the difference to be barely perceptible from proper installs.
I've been using Knoppix for a while now and have found it to be really rather awesome. The possible uses are almost limitless and this will improve even more if the ability to write to NTFS volumes is ever introduced.
For example: Recently a friend managed to fuck up his Window XP install beyond repair. I burned him a copy of the ISO and Knoppix sorted it out in minutes. It's blisteringly fast, the hardware auto-detection has to be seen to be believed and the amount of software on that one disc is mindblowing. It's certainly worth keeping a CD copy handy...
However, I'm intrigued as to why MandrakeMove wasn't included in the article. I much prefer to use Knoppix because of its ability to mount hard drives, but MandrakeSoft have been very perceptive in their implementation of USB keys. By carrying around configuration options and personal data on a USB storage device, anyone equipped with a MandrakeMove disc can convert any CD-bootable PC around the world into an equivalent of their home desktop. Many people have predicted that this could become a lot more commonplace in the future where computer users would have to rely a lot less on a home workstation-centric lifestyle. I haven't investigated, but I would guess that persistence can be gained in Knoppix by somehow copying the contents of the ramdrive somewhere more permanent.
Turkeyphant
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
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.
The ability to run linux straight from the CD with no low level hard disk interference may not be enough of itself to encourage investigation and/or take up of linux by Windows users but it certainly represents a leap forward.
Most Windows users are not computer nerds, they're just people who *use* computers - installing an operating system onto a hard disk, with or without risk to their existing setup, is just way beyond their skills or desires.
Speed issues can be helped out if not resolved by use of RAM disk as demonstrated by http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
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
Here are some instances I can think of:
- home entertainment systems
- small office use (with data saved on network disk)
- education and training (data on USB drives)
- standardized corporate desktops (data on network)
- cybercafe workstations
- point-of-sale terminals
- industrial kiosks
- voting systems
- automated tellers
- DJ workstations
- application demos (both standalone and interactive)
- games
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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!
I suspect that there are a lot of people like me who work long hours and don't have time to do a lenghty install. Knoppix allows me to enjoy and explore Linux in the little time I have available.
I got a copy of sun's java desktop from the linuxworld expo. It is basically a gnome desktop that boots from a CD; not too bad although I haven't played with it much.
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.
I also learnt about Quantian right after I finished building my 24 processor cluster
But how can you work with one of those ? You can surf the web but that's about all. You cannot write to NTFS partitions, so that precludes their use on a Windows machine as an alternate OS. If you can't save files it's useless as far as I can tell.
Please, please, disprove me.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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!.
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.
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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.
Q.
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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.
Now, this and Morphix ("Unfortunately, noone can be told what the Morphix is") got me thinking:
It should be technically feasible to automate the creation of customized .ISO files for live Linux distros:
Suppose MandrakeSoft sets up some heavy servers with a shop frontend (pricing just an example):
- $20: Choose packages and have ISO created for download.
- $10 Have a CD burned and mailed to you.
- $10 Reconfigure your package choice and get a fresh ISO.
- $10 Have a fresh ISO made out using the current kernel/KDE/OpenOffice/whatever.
- $20 Upgrade to DVD size image.
- $?? Support (not much to do here)
- $20 Printed manual
You'll have your name put somewhere into it so you won't have to type it in (thus you won't like to redistribute it wildly, either), and you'd set the default language, permanent storage options etc.Advantages:
- Never install or update applications manually.
- Update whenever you feel like it - often or rarely.
- Never have a failed dependency or inconsistent versions after getting an update.
- No product activation or other licensing hassle.
- You can't mess up your install (except by physically destroying the CD
:). - Hackers can't put backdoors on your machine.
- Virus infection not possible.
- Even a harddrive crash doesn't destroy your install.
- You can even run without any hard drive in the first place.
A public library could run their computers off a stack of these and not have to worry about people hacking the config - nothing to hack. Even a stolen CD is not a problem, you just bring out a backup copy. It's all Free Software anyway, you can let anyone steal it.The selling of individual ISO's is automated, the distributor merely maintains the packages on the server and collects the money. Sends a donation to OSDL once in a while :)
Any reason this should not work?
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
At LinuxWorld last week, John "Mad Dog" Hall gave an excellent talk that, among other recommendations, made a crucial point about introducing newcomers to Linux:
This is the problem I've seen with distros like Knoppix - while they're great resources for experienced Linux users who want to have all of their favorite tools available anywhere, the number of apps is too much for newbies to handle. If you want to turn someone off Linux, just tell them "Well, for word processing you could use Abiword, or KWord, or OpenOffice. And look, you can use Dillo, or Mozilla, or Konqueror, or Firebird as your web browser. Isn't this great!" - I guarantee eyes will rapidly glaze over. The "let them explore the CD" approach is no better - the menus are cluttered and unintuitive to the newcomer, and the plethora of application interfaces with wildly different visual styles and conventions will finish confusing and scaring them.
If you really want to introduce people to Linux using a LiveCD, I recommend taking the time to make a custom CD that carefully selects a subset of the available applications that will be both interesting and accessible to your audience. This is actually quite easy and fun to do, starting from Knoppix (or Damn Small Linux, or Morphix, or...), and is one of the most useful things you can do to help Linux gain acceptance by a broader audience.