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Ubuntu Linux Live CD Release
tola writes "The Ubuntu development team have reached their first milestone in the production of the Live CD version of the upcoming release of Ubuntu
codenamed 'Hoary Hedgehog.' This edition features a completely redesigned system for creating Live CDs. While some people have tried rough previews, this is the first proper milestone for the live CD version. Anyone, especially folks who are
using our previous release (4.10 'Warty Warthog'), are encouraged to try this out.
The Live CD runs completely off of the CD and will not touch any of the data on your hard drive so is a fantastic way to get a preview of new features in the upcoming Ubuntu release without upgrading your system. ISO images for i386, AMD64 and PowerPC can be downloaded from Ubuntu."
I've used that on several network fileservers, but for my main machine, I rely primarily on WindowsXP because of its ease of use. I have loaded Knoppix on this guy a few times when I want to play Shisen-sho or Mahjongg, but I always have that fear in the back of my that something is going to break on my base Windows system.
What precautions do these LiveCDs take to prevent damage from occuring to the installed base system? I trust Knoppix because I've used it a few times, but Ubuntu has a funny name, so I'm a little more wary of it.
Apparently Ubuntu is Richard Stallan's recommended distro. "Apparently" ... the place where I saw this made no mention of why, but I assume it has to do with licensing issues.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
That would be Viidalinux http://desktop.vidalinux.com/. It's packaging system (Portage)is wonderful, and I have also seen a review claiming that it's Gentoo done right! This is not meant to mean that Gentoo has any problem. I tend to agree with that claim after taking a test drive of the two.
Gnoppix is now based on Ubuntu. How is the Ubuntu live cd different from Gnoppix?
GNU/Ubuntu?
It's spelled Gnubuntu
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
The Ubuntu site seems to be missing a bunch of important details about the distro. Specifically, is there any way to see a list of their package repositories without actually installing Ubuntu?
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
If the powerpc livecd is any good, I basically intend to do an Ubuntu -> Debian -> seriously rearrange the userland. I've been wanting a powerpc livecd that will let do the things x86 livecds have been helping me do for years now. I've been remastering my own Knoppix cds for awhile. I'm hoping it won't be too hard to base a powerpc livecd development system off of this.
The scary naked people are meant to be all happy and welcoming, i think. But they just look scary. The lass in the orange top's got nice tits, though.
I agree. Ubuntu doesn't have many applications outside of the standard gnome applications. I found myself pulling many packages from the Debian respositories. Soon enough I had a full blown hybrid on my hands. So I scrapped it and went back to full Debian sarge.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Just a little preface. I am a Windows user. I probably always will be a Windows user. I like using it and am proficient in it's workings.
For years I've tried several distrobutions. Redhat (starting with 5), Fedora, Mandrake, Debian, Suse, and I even managed a stage 1 Gentoo install once (with limited results). The problem is I would be able to "use" the systems I set these up on, but never as well as my Windows setups. I just had trouble learning how to walk again.
Four days ago, I started installing Ubuntu on a recommendation from someone. I had enough spare parts to whip up a competent PC (Athlon XP 2500+, 512mb RAM, 18gb 10,000 rpm scsi drive, Geforce 2 GTS).
I installed Ubuntu, and was absolutely shocked. This was a distro that a dumb lifelong Windows user could run, and have it do everything I wanted. Granted, any other distro could do the same, but this one made it simple for someone like me. I've had no trouble keeping my software installed an up to date, thanks to the use of apt-get and not having to worry about dependencies (always a big roadblock for me). I've been able to get all my hardware working (even my digital camera, amazing for me), play some of my Windows only games with Cedega, and even get proper video playback with my media player.
Being that this is Slashdot, many of the linux aficionados may say "So? all that is pretty trivial." The thing is, it was always a struggle for someone like me. Ubuntu has made me love linux, and even make it contend for my attention away from Windows.
And what seems like a little pinch of fate, my main Athlon 64 box just died (lousy MSI motherboard issues). Now I am "forced" to use my linux box as a primary computer. And now I'm even considering putting Ubuntu on my laptop!
Weird! I got the DHCP failed message at initial blue console DHCP detection booting screen. Then it sent sigkill and sigterm to all processes (another weird thing like it was shutting down) prior to loading modules and then Gnome. At the Gnome desktop, DHCP now works and I can access the web. Perhaps there was some initial h/w detection happening before than main system loaded?
But anyways, I was greeted by nice music on my SoundBlaster Live PCI sound as Gnome loaded and my ATI Radeon is working, although using the open source drivers of course.
In the Knoppix community there has been some effort to make Knoppix boot using WINGRUB initiated from the XP bootloader.
.iso file residing on your NTFS partition.
.iso-file.
:)
Inserting one line in your boot.ini can make the XP bootloader execute WINGRUB from your factory preinstalled NTFS partition and with WINGRUB you can load a Linux kernel and a miniroot package from the same NTFS partition.
So far this all works with a recent stock Knoppix (which I suppose Ubuntu live CD is also based on) and stock WINGRUB (grub4dos.sf.net) but the problem is that the stock miniroot does not feature the read-only NTFS-kernel module so you can not load Knoppix direcly from an
Tested patches to miniroot DO exist for this to work and they are acquirable from knoppix.net forums, but they have not yet been added to the official Knoppix distribution.
It should be fairly easy to incorporate these changes to a custom live CD like the one of Ubuntu's and this would make it possible to offer a Windows installer which setups WINGRUB, Linux kernel and the modified miniroot, searches (or just asks) for the location of your downloaded Ubuntu Live CD and after that just lets the user choose to boot into a HD based Live CD residing on a
For some people who just want to test a live CD the burning process might be too much of a step to take. This approach would be a no-cost, no-partitioning, no-bootrecord-touching way for these people to hop into the wonderful world of Linux live CD's
Yes, I'm happy to see those "next generation" distros aimed not to offer everything to the user on CD's and major customizability in the installer, to confuse newbies with hundreds of packages. I find these to be distros like Suse or Mandrake and think they to a large group of newbies are going in entirely the wrong direction. They simply just keep growing. To the point it's not even longer about bloat, but about confusion of package redundancy as well.
These new ones often aim for a 1 CD size, and there's not only Ubuntu for Gnome fans, but MEPIS for KDE fans, Yoper for a CPU optimized distro that's still easy to use. The effect of these are that they're less confusing, more stable (simply since less things can go wrong), and streamlined for new users.
I've always wanted Linux distros with a focus on ease of use while maintaining the greatness of, for example, being a full fledged Debian-based OS, and instead of focusing on giving the user an installer on 6 CD's or whatever, have it on one, and instead ensure the install/uninstall system is good, and focus on getting the stuff that's in right. Luckily I'm starting to see exactly those arrive now, and it has made me switch from Windows to dual booting with MEPIS Linux, throwing out my old buggy Mandrake 10 install that constantly kept producing crash dumps in my home directory silently for some reason, all since the fresh install of it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Moderators should mod the parent up because in an ironic way it is unintentionally quite funny.
It's funny because the post illustrates a fact that becomes obvious to anyone reguarly reading the 'technical' reviews devoted to liveCDs. The reviews never mention anything about the underlying techniques that the liveCD uses, as if such things were totally unimportant, and yet go into excruciating detail about every little package and widget on the Gnome/KDE desktop as if that was really important.
The fact is the speed of application launching and general 'user experience' of using the liveCD is very much determined by the filesystem used, the file placing strategy (if any), and other general lowlevel things which never get a mention. Try it sometime by reading a LiveCD review, they may tell you what packages are on the CDROM but they never ever tell you how the liveCD was built and what it was built out of!
I'd consider myself an "advanced" user, been using Linux since 1993 or so and am a full time Linux admin. Ubuntu is a very nice distribution because it just works and is very stable. It takes the best aspects of Debian and creates a stable up-to-date desktop distribution based on GNOME.
:)
Gentoo, FC3, and Debian unstable are great but you also spend a lot of your time updating and tweaking the operating system. And even advanced users get tired of constantly managing their OS at some point
As for speed, Ubuntu has fewer services starting than Fedora does. It's more locked down by default(for example, no sshd). No idea why your system was so slow. I've run FC3 and Gentoo on my current box and Ubuntu performs the same. If it was slower, I'd notice it as I've run performance comparisons on World of Warcraft running under both FC3 and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is not a newbie distribution. It's the best GNOME based dist out if you just want something that runs and doesn't need constant managing. That may make it good for newbies, but it doesn't make mean more advanced users wouldn't like it.
I'm running SimplyMepis on my laptop now, and I just tried the live version of Ubuntu last night.
Both Mepis and Ubuntu detect my Centrino wireless, but only Mepis makes it work. Ubuntu gives some error at boot and then doesn't even show it as a device once the system is up. Both detect my Synaptics touchpad, but only Mepis has all its functionality working "out of the box". And Mepis provides most useful (though not Free) plugins for Mozilla/Firefox already installed and configured.
YMMV, but if you try Ubuntu and have problems with it, you definitely should take a look at Mepis.
I mod down all the "free iPod"-sig losers.
Typos in the original article not withstanding, I am very happy to see an AMD64 live CD that I can use as a rescue disk the next time I hose LILO (or MS does it for me). Sure the Debian AMD64 install disk could be made to work, but it doesn't automagically detect my SATA drives and has very few of the utilities I would need should I hose my system a little more than just mucking up LILO. This is a very welcome discovery.