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XLiveCD: Cygwin and X For Windows On A Live CD
mallumax writes "OSnews is running a story
on XliveCD which runs an X server (from X.org) from the CD using Cygwin. Also included are awk, sed, perl, vim, bash, grep, other text utilities, and most importantly an OpenSSH client. XliveCD is being developed by University Technology Services of Indiana University. Now you can carry Cygwin with you! I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Torrent link."
Making your own Cygwin based "live CD" is astonishingly easy.
I have been carrying versions of my own design for many years now.
I even include a nice litte autorun feature with mine.
I was going to ask what the point was, given the number of Live CDs such as Knoppix, etc. Then I actually RTFA and they suggest it's for use in public access Windows boxes, where a reboot may not be available but running stuff from the CD is.
I still suspect VNC on a USB key or CD might be easier, and the difference between forwarding X and using VNC isn't that much in my experience.
The reality is a little less exciting - just a program you can run from a CD. (yawn).
Do they also include coLinux on the CD? Being able to run Linux from a LiveCD directly onder windows would be a really nice feature me thinks.
I see the point for portables computers with WiFi or GPRS Internet access, which can be a pain (or simply impossible) to setup under Linux. Imagine that you can borrow a laptop from time to time at work to go on the road, and cannot afford to take hours to install cygwin, but with this solution instead you can in seconds connect to your remote Unix server.
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Just downloaded it. This CD is great! The "insert and go" character of the CD makes it very useful.
.ssh directory should not be placed on the desktop! :)
Only one comment: the
.sig: No such file or directory
FTA:
The software runs from the CD without being installed
and a few lines down:
The wizard presents a menu of reading documentation, running the X Server from the CD and installing the software to the hard drive
So, does it run completely from cd or not? If it really needs to install stuff to the harddisk it could form a problem in work environments where users might not have write access to the harddisk.
I currently work for an organization that has very strict (and government controlled) policies in place for the installation and use of software packages. It's called bureaucracy. To install PuTTy on my XP workstation I must submit a ticket via our Management System interface. That ticket must then be assigned to my manager for an approval for the request of the software. Once my manager approves (could be a week or more) the ticket is then assigned to a senior manager for approval. Once that senior manager approves the installation of the software the ticket is assigned to an auditor to evaluate the financial impact on the company, the auditor must then write up a RFP (Request for Purchase) and submit approval to the ticket. The ticket is then assigned to the final approver (who is usually the CIO or another officer just below) who evaluates the ticket, verifies the approvals, verifies the finanical impact, approves the ticket, then assigns it to the Desktop Admin. The Desktop Admin then assigns the ticket to a Support Technician to be implemented. (ie. installed) (Oh, and I'm a member of IT and a Support Analyst, by the way.)
At any point in that process, if there is a denial. The whole thing must be reviewed, reentered, and start all over again.
This, I drop it in the CD-ROM, install nothing, run the X apps I need to run on the UNIX gear I monitor. Remove the CD, reboot, and no impact to the installed system that requires red tape.
Does that help?
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Yes, but if you use a native Windows version you have to use the terrible Windows command prompt. Does anyone know a replacement that remembers its command history prior to the last reboot and (for bonus points) lets you cut, copy and paste using the standard Ctrl x/c/v.
The true purpose of this, I strongly suspect, is actually to justify replacing Unix and GNU/Linux workstations with Dells, which is exactly what has been going on lately. No one seems to have thought of how anyone was going to be able to access our general purpose Unix environment from these machines, so they threw this together.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Well, cygwin normally needs to be installed with registry entries to tell it where to find its root directory (and potentially other "mounted fs"'s, too). Presumably this CD has a hacked version that doesn't need those entries (perhaps by just using the path to cygwin1.dll returned by GetModulePath() to derive it automatically for each new program started?).
Has anybody made a *samll* backage of the Cygwin/X? Putty + that should be very small and fit anywhere (like USB kaychain). Cygwin/X should not need much... I almost did it, but had problems with fonts that I could not solve.
That's funny when you consider that the awkwardness of Winblows is the whole reason to use this CD. When I have a guest, it's as easy to let them use my network as adduser. The guests don't have to be in my house either. Uptime? People like Steve Ballmer who aim for 60 days of uptime worry about that. I've gotten used to my power failing before my computers do. While it's nice to have good ssh clients, using them on a system that's notorious for auto installing keyloggers is foolish. Finally, when you use something like knoppix, you generally get as good or better performance as Windows gives loaded down as it usually is by utilities that fail to keep malware off.
there are still many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device. ... the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver
Your hardware must be different from the hardware I see most of the time. I've seen Knoppix boot up AMD 64 systems and other cutting edge stuff without problems. A set that won't give at least 1024 by 768 resolution is rare and you can try to force better with "ctrl alt +" if the conservative setting is not good enough for you. This might not be good enough for playing games, but it's more than enough to show off the real work that can be done with two office suits and two excellent browsers. Others, such as Morphix, have game CDs if you want that. The only place a boot CD might have problems with hardware is wireless networking, but wrapper software can fix that. Hardware compatibility, by the way, is much easier than software compatibility. M$ can break this toy with a single Winblows update as they have broken people's X and unix connectivity in the past. As time goes by, your chances of everthing working will be greater with an old Knoppix than it will be with an old copy of this CD.
Knoppix and CDs like it are the easiest and most secure way to move files. Once booted, you can use Konqueror's built in sftp to drag and drop files across a split window. What could be easier than that? If you want quick, zip the files and boot with business card linux and use sftp from the command line.
Finally, there's nothing like running a live linux CD to show your buddy just how easy it is to get Linux. If there are problems, it's better they show up there than later.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I made just such a CD for myself nearly 3 years ago so that I could have cygwin (particularly SSH), emacs, CVS, Java, and Mozilla with me wherever I happened to be, such as in the classroom. The fun part was getting the autorun feature to properly set up the paths. I also made use of the TMP variable as the directory where I could write to the local disk when needed. I suppose what I really should do is establish a RAM disk.
I have recently even been considering migrating to a DVD so I can install the full cygwin installation along with Firefox and plugins; music and video players and rippers; some USB device drivers for my camera, MP3 players, voice recorder, and smart media scanner; and if I can figure it out also the synchronization software for my phone and PDA so I am not tied to a single machine!
I suppose you could add games, too., as if I had time for such things. Hm... the CD emulator with the CD images... I could perhaps include a few of my favorite classics!
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, but use X to do WHAT exactly? Click on pretty buttons over and over again? If I can't have cygwin on disk, able to manipulate files, save scripts, etc, what's the use, really? The few Unix apps that are worth the trouble of running in an X11 window on a Windows box, already have native ports.
Native ports, yes, but does your desktop Windows machine compare to this?
unix:$ sysinfo
General Information
Manufacturer is Sun (Sun Microsystems)
System Model is Fire V440
Main Memory is 16.0 GB
Virtual Memory is 38.1 GB
ROM Version is OBP 4.13.0 2004/01/19 18:28
Number of CPUs is 4
CPU Type is sparc
(note: some details cut out to preserve the server's anonymity)
This liveCD would be pretty useful to me. I would rather run my big computational and memory-intensive programs on our campus "big iron" unix servers than on my little pentium 4 desktop machine, which only has one cpu and a half a gig of ram. But hey, I'm a CS student writing chaos programs. YMMV.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,