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."

Comments

RMS's choice

[vandan]

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?

Re:RMS's choice

[i_should_be_working]

Ubuntu also has those non-free repositories. But only non-free that's still legal and free as in beer. To get stuff like mp3 playing/encoding and dvd playing you have to go to some other repository or compile it yourself.

So RMS likes that a user has to make a real effort to get non-free stuff, and that they'll be aware what they're doing.

On Gentoo I installed non-free stuff frequently with no idea of their liscensing issues.

Re:you mean

[DA-MAN]

GNU/Ubuntu?

It's spelled Gnubuntu

Ubuntu made me love linux

[MightyPez]

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!

I am typing this from Ubunto Live CD

[grolschie]

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.

Make it boot from a NTFS drive (possible)

[siveys]

In the Knoppix community there has been some effort to make Knoppix boot using WINGRUB initiated from the XP bootloader.

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 .iso file residing on your NTFS partition.

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 .iso-file.

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 :)