Category: Categories

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Getting Open Source to the Dialup Masses

Slashdot has posted about the Freedom Toasters setup in Africa by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The concept is simple, bring blank media to the kiosk and chose the software you want burned onto it. LiveCDs included on the toaster are Knoppix 3.6 and 3.9, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and ClusterKnoppix.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Bio-protected USB stick boots Debian Linux

LinuxDevices.com is reporting on something new. It’s a bootable USB drive with an embedded fingerprint scanner. You get to carry your desktop wherever you go, plus it stays secure. It’s always nice to see companies creating innovative products.

The COS can boot x86 computers capable of booting from USB, or from CD-ROM thanks to a downloadable initrd kernel image.

I’m not sure where the fingerprint scanner goes with the CDROM version, I’m guessing you still need the USB stick.

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Weekend Homework

If you have not already done this, go download Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. The combined size will only be 110 MB, and you’ll have some amazing capabilites. After you’ve got them running, see how simple it is to install them onto a keydrive, or to have them load into memory so you can add programs, change settings, and then burn the results (using the now-free CD burner) to create your own custom LiveCD. One fun thing you could do is create a LiveCD which automatically boots up, loads any shared music directories on your network, and starts playing the songs in random order. Now you have a use for that Pentium 133 laptop that’s been sitting in your closet.

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Run GNU/Linux from a USB pen drive

NewsForge has an article describing how to get SLAX installed and running from a USB pen/key/jump/thumb drive. Useful information that can probably be applied to other LiveCDs as well.

Slax is a powerful and complete bootable distro based on Slackware, equipped with kernel 2.6, ALSA sound drivers, Wi-Fi card support, X11-6.8.2 with support for many GFX cards and wheel mice, and KDE 3.4.