LiveCD News

Useful instructions from LifeHacker for anyone getting started with LiveCDs.

How to Boot From a CD or USB Drive on Any PC.

Ars Technica creates a bootable LiveUSB of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview:

To get an idea of what can and cant be done with Windows to Go, I built my own installation of the OS—a task that is not for the faint of heart, as it involves the command line.

via Ars Technica

Kyle Rankin, author of Knoppix Hacks, has a Google Tech Talk presentation video detailing tricks for customizing Knoppix without going through the lengthy remastering process.

OMG! Ubuntu! has an article covering additional uses for the Ubuntu LiveCD besides installation.

Lifehacker has a Top 10 list of cool stuff to do with a USB flash drive. Numbers 9, 7, and 1 involve Live booting operating systems from them.

I’ll just get this out right now, I’ve fallen for Live USB drives. Yes, and if you haven’t yet, you will. What fills an entire CD, only fills 17% of a 4GB thumb drive (8% of an 8GB, 4% of a 16GB, 2% of a 32GB, and so on). And you don’t have to throw them away when you’re done using them or if they’re outdated, you just reinstall.

via TildeHash

OMG! Ubuntu! is featuring Novo Builder, an easy to use LiveCD/DVD creation tool.

via OMG! Ubuntu!

TechRadar takes Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10 and installs them on USB flash drives.

You’ll need a flash drive with at least 1GB of free space, and ISO images of either Ubuntu 8.10 or Fedora 9. It’s likely there are other distros out there that work with similar or perhaps even identical instructions, but Ubuntu and Fedora are the big two so we stuck with them.

LinuxHaxor.net has a list of useful tasks for the GParted LiveCD.

We all fill up our hard-drives from time to time, but thanks to Gnome GParted, rearranging disk partitions isn’t as terrifying as it used to be. In fact, armed with a GParted Live CD, there’s a swathe of disk space fiddling jobs I can tackle without gnawing my fingers to the bone:

The Defensive Computing blog at CNET News has a great introduction to LiveCDs and their practical uses.

Now, another emphatic endorsement – all Windows users should have a Linux Live CD, and, know how to use it.

Highlighted by the latest Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (#88), there’s a great tutorial in the Ubuntu forums for transforming an Ubuntu install into a custom LiveCD/DVD.

This HOWTO is about making a live CD/DVD from the main system on your hard drive. This might be desired if you have customized your system and want to have it on CD. It can be useful also if you want to create a recovery CD from scratch, as you can make a minimal system using debootstrap and transform it into a live CD.

HowtoForge resets the root password of a Linux system with Knoppix.

Ars Technica’s open source journal has news and links to running a modified Xubuntu 7.10 off a USB flash drive on an Eee laptop. The installer still works too, so installing permanently is an option.

HowtoForge has instructions for building a custom LiveCD out of an Ubuntu based system.

This guide shows how you can create a Live-CD from your Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon or Linux Mint 4.0 system with a tool called remastersys. Remastersys is available in the Linux Mint romeo repository. You can customize your Ubuntu/Linux Mint system and then let remastersys create an iso image of it which you can then burn onto a CD/DVD.

Red Hat Magazine has instructions for making a Fedora 8 bootable USB flash drive.

I am writing this article on a Windows laptop borrowed from a friend. But fear not, dear reader, for I have not abandoned my free software principles. For while the hard disk of this laptop contains the Windows operating system, I have used a USB key as the boot device, and the laptop is currently running Fedora 8, codenamed “Werewolf.”

Lifehacker has a great set of instructions for using SystemRescueCD to create, move, and copy partitions on a normal PC.

Linux.com has instructions for backing up partitions using GParted-Clonezilla.

Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work — until youve tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands. And since Clonezilla is available as part of the GParted-Clonezilla live CD, you dont even have to install it.

Free Software Magazine takes us through the simple process of creating a custom LiveCD with the recently released Fedora 7.

A few weeks ago, I promised to explain how to create your own custom live CD with Fedora’s new tools. Well, last week Fedora 7 was launched and all the tools you need are available in the repositories. This even includes a brand new graphical tool, put together by the people at Fedora Unity, called Revisor, which will allow you to spin your own live CD or installation material in an unbelievably user friendly manner.

HowtoForge walks through recovering data from a RAID 1 setup using Knoppix.

Blogcritics.org goes over repartition a hard drive with the GParted LiveCD.

“Okay, little Percival, let me tell you what partitioning was like in the old days. If you already had information on your hard drive, but wanted to re-partition it, all your data would be erased. There were programs available that would partition your drive without erasing all your stuff, but they cost money.”