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Giant List Of Linux-based Live CDs

Posted by timothy on from the good-bookmark dept.

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."

6 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Growing Distros by Mork29 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Growing Distros by Ziviyr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My wild guess is that CDs fit alot as is, and are much cheaper, which pays off with all the revisions. And DVD burners aren't as hugely common as CD burners. (also, compressed loopback was buggy at large sizes last time I heard it was tried)

      A DVD would provide a stretched-limo kind of Live CD experience though. :-)

      --

      Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
    2. Re:Growing Distros by dagar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While bandwidth is a concern, why not put torrent list for all these live cds and live dvds? A legitimate use for BitTorrent.

  2. We dont need more LiveCDs! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)

    1. Re:We dont need more LiveCDs! by silicon+not+in+the+v · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Welcome to slow computer country. Live CDs like Knoppix are great, especially for demo purposes or as a rescue disk, but they are not exactly fast, especially if you are starting larger programs.
      I have a story about this one. I have a mostly-working Debian install (except my sound card), but I was running from a Knoppix CD to see if it could configure my sound card and then maybe I would be able to find out what drivers to set up for my real hard drive install. My wife came into the room, on the phone with her dad, and asked if I could pull up a web browser to find a page she wanted to tell her dad about. I answered, "Well, uh, OK." I clicked to open Mozilla, and as it chugged and chugged (300MHz machine with 192MB RAM) she tried to explain to her dad why it was taking so long.
      "He's using Linux...It's another operating system that tries to copy what Windows does, but generally only computer-people use it because you have to write your own programs for it."
      At this point, my Mozilla window came up, but the graphics were really distorted because Knoppix hadn't set up the S3 driver for my video card, so it was using vesa or fbdev. It was pretty much unreadable.
      "Well, it's really slow, and most of the time stuff doesn't work...[to me:]Why do people use it anyway?"
      I just said that I was a little too upset to answer right now. Later, we discussed why I was so upset about it. I told her that I was running the version from CD to diagnose something, so it's naturally slower and not as good as it's supposed to be. I said that it's like she had come up to someone who has a flat tire by the side of the road, and she asks for a ride. The person may say OK to try to be nice and help out, but while you're riding along, you're complaining about how this car has terrible ride quality and doesn't corner well and is really bumpy.
      I am trying to learn to use Linux, but it has been a slow-going experience because I am doing it on our secondary computer that doesn't have great hardware. Even Windows doesn't auto-detect my ISA sound card, but it comes with a driver disk that makes it work. I could go spend the $20 each for a new video card and new sound card, but I figure I would like to learn more about how to overcome problems like this and how to search for answers to this stuff online.
      --
      We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
  3. More than half based on Knoppix by eadz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.