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Giant List Of Linux-based Live CDs
nick58b writes "After searching the Internet and not being able to find a list of all available Linux Live CDs, I decided to create one. In its current form, it attempts to makes finding a Live CD easy. There are nearly 100 Live CD distributions listed so far, with functions ranging from clustering to home entertainment, and ISO image sizes from 5 to 702 Megabytes."
Well, I know that some distro's can have installs of up to 2 or 3GB (ok, alot of that is source-code), but why aren't there any live DVD's? People really haven't explored this medium for distributing data. Many programs and games have still refused to switch over to DVD, despite it's wide usage in most new computers. Why is this?
If a see once more YALCD on Freshmeat or Distrowatch I am shove my CD-RW drive up the author's ass! (and run the eject command in the process)
There are too many of them, the more there are, the more fragmented they become and therefore less tested, resulting loads of crap cds with poor hardware dectection, buggy apps and does not bode well for Live CDs.
So if you want to make one, DON'T, help fix the bugs on the major ones, such as Knoppix and MandrakeMove, and let the other ones die unless they have a Good Reason to exisit (such as ClusterKnoppix or Knoppmyth) rather than just being a YALCD (Such as Mepis and Gnoppix)
Over half of these 100 "Distros" are Knoppix remasters. Here's a list of 60+ Knoppix remasters. The reason there are so many? It's very easy to make your own Knoppix remaster. I'm pretty sure many of these distros have 5 users if the're lucky.
What would be a really a help for us, DVD-/+R/RW users is to have some sort sort of "LiveDVD HOWTO" describing how to build your own LiveDVD.
It could be useful for Gentoo users to burn it with all packages required and later use on the computer without a network (yes, sill there are such sometimes). Other Linux distros can benefit as well.
Also it could be useful to create a backup LiveDVD. Later it could be used to boot and restore the failed system.
Less is more !
Particulary if you, like me, are just poking into this Linux thing and want to test several different versions without having to invest in a sexond harddisk or get rid of my still fully working Windowns installation. I'll definitly be spending using a lot of my bandwidth to download some distros this weekend *smiles*
What I miss, however, is beeing able to see what minimum hardware requirement the various LiveCDs need without having to look at each one that looks interesting. Can't have everything I guess.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
What would be a really a help for us, DVD-/+R/RW users is to have some sort sort of "LiveDVD HOWTO" describing how to build your own LiveDVD.
Why stop at a howto? Make a program around it. The reason is that many who want a live DVD will be first timers and might be troubled by a howto and all the 'geek speak' in it.
People who realy do need it to repair things will either be able to work it out themselves, just run the program or are happy enough with a CD.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
> - no history, no embarassment.
You know, history is actually a feature if you're not surfing porn...
> The size of DVD images can be too big: many sites would hesitate to publish it afraiding too many people would download it and crash their sites, while many users would hesitate to download it as it's too big for their DSL lines.
:)
Duh! This is exactly the problem that BitTorrent is designed to solve!
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I refuse to use
Alright, I agree with pretty much everybody about the whole Read-only positive aspects of live CD. No Hard Drive , easier administration etc. BUt guys wake up. The industry has created an aswer to all this and it's called THIN-CLIENT. That,s right. On the local machine they run an os of some ROM or even better boot from the network. On one central server there is a shared drive, permissions for applications etc. I reckon that is the future of entreprise desktop. Do this remind AS/400 to anybody else but me? Is history repeating itself or what?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
You cut right through the fanboy cult rabidity that is often displayed by linux afficionados. The bottom line is that if you make it easier for the sheep to use, and more importantly you have an easy way to show them, on their hardware, how it works, they will use it. Dazzle them with the blinkenlights *first*, then work on the ideology. 'Free' as in anything confuses people sometimes, but empowerment vs sucking on the MS teat is pretty appealing. In the process, you might even make some of them stop being sheep.
This is not the case. These CDs do not provide a thin client at all. All processing is done client side, and they can be used at any machine without a specific server.
With a thin client/terminal server system, you would have a fully running server which you could connect just about any hardware to. However, if you were down at the local computer shop and wanted to test compatibility, would you lug your server down there? How about if you were at a friends house and needed to fix a local HDD problem using a more useful program than DOS fdisk?
No, these CDs are NOT thin clients. They are temporary fat clients.
Remember when computers could only run one program? You'd grab a floppy, put it in the drive, then boot the machine? It was probably obvious to many, but I just realized that this is sort of a return to that. No worries about viruses, operating system is customized to the application(s).
I wonder what other "progress" in computers could be improved by using ideas from the past.
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Set me up to store my settings on an FTP server!!!! Accessible from anywhere in the world! Security (via username and password) built it.
You mean ssh/sftp, right?