IBM’s SoulPad portable virtual computing environment

Engadget has news and a link to a video demonstrating IBM’s SoulPad, a virtual computing environment that allows you to save your computing session, with all your open programs, and move to another physical machine and start where you left off. The presenter says it is based on Knoppix, but in the video it really looks like Windows XP is the OS running after Knoppix boots (of course it’s simple to get Linux to look like XP, so that could explain the green and blue task bar).

Mepis Lite Beta Review

Gnuman.com has a review of Mepis Lite. Check out what it’s all about here.

Mepis is a simple and easy to use Live-CD based distribution that can be easily installed on your hard drive. As you can see in our review of Mepis SoHo Server that Mepis is really trying to put together the right moves to knock off the current and most popular distro in Ubuntu.

Langa Letter: A Must-Have Repair And Recovery Tool

InformationWeek has a four page review of BartPE. BartPE allows people to create LiveCDs from their personally owned copy of Windows. I’m not sure how this affects the licensing, so you may need to do a bit of reading if you’d like to stay legal. Another strange thing about this review is how it continually praises the features provided by BartPE, while neglecting to mention other LiveCDs like Knoppix, which easily has 100x more ability.

BartPE lets you start or stop file sharing on the PC you’re working on; set or reset the Admin password; or even invoke XP’s powerful “Remote Desktop Connection” facility. Combined, these abilities facilitate moving files to or from a distant PC, or using repair and recovery tools located on another system.

Linux.com | Review: Slax 5.0.6

Linux.com reviews the latest Slax LiveCD. Check it out to learn what Slax provides.

The first time I used it, Slax restored my faith in my old clunker of a Toshiba laptop. The distribution ran (and even booted) faster from the CD-ROM drive than Windows did from the hard disk. But as I began to get a feel for Slax and use it to browse the Web, listen to music, and the like, I didn’t feel like Slax had sacrificed usability for agility. This fine balance alone would make Slax an interesting and noteworthy distro, but it has even more tricks up its sleeve.

Gaming Router / Firewall

Lan Game Reviews has a good how-to guide for seting up a router that will allow you to play online games no matter who is on your network. They use m0n0wall for the LiveCD, no hard drive needed.

The next step is to enable Traffic Shaping. This is what prioritizes packets so you get great pings while downloading. Click on the Traffic Shaping button on the left menu bar, and click the Magic Shaper Wizard tab. Select the checkbox saying Set P2P traffic to lowest priority and input the downstream and upstream speeds for your connection.

A new ‘Puppy’ can add new life to older computers

Amnews.com has an article about Puppy Linux. I’m not familiar with this source, but it looks like LiveCDs are becoming more and more mainstream.

Puppy can be run from a live CD or installed on a hard drive, flash drive or ZIP drive. When booting from a CD, Puppy does not require a hard drive because it can save everything back to your CD. In order to do this, however, a CD burner is required.

Mono Live Rulez!

Over at O’Reilly’s site, Kevin Shockey, the same person who recently reviewed the Snappix LiveCD, takes a look at Mono Live.

In addition to the core mono-based tools MonoDevelop, MonoDoc, and xsp, the Live CD also includes Postgres, pgAdmin III, and Glade.

Whax Stand-alone Penetration-testing Live distro Review

gnuman.com has a good review of WHAX 3.0. If you’re wondering why you would want to download WHAX, this review will answer that question.

when you open the ‘k’ menu, you will notice the top menu ‘Whax tools’; this menu is what sets Whax apart from the crowd. the ‘Whax tools’ menu is divided into easy and obvious sub-menu’s, from enumeration to fuzzers and bluetooth utilities.

Fuzzers? Anyone want to add that to Wikipedia?

Open source industry group offers free server software to Australian schools

The Beer Files has news of a new Linux LiveCD dedicated to setting up working enviroments for schools to give their students. It does not appear to be released yet, but looks like a great use of a LiveCD.

According to OSV, LiveLAMP can turn any PC into an instant server capable of supporting up to 1,000 students doing work on over a dozen programming languages and hundreds of development tools.