Ubuntu 6.10 is (almost) Out

The new Ubuntu LiveCDs are being announced on Ubuntu.com. While the link is still pointing to the 6.06.1 release, ISO images of 6.10 are currently propagating throughout the Ubuntu mirrors in a hidden folder called .pool, which happily has full read access. The new Desktop CDs (LiveCDs as they’re known around here) boot significantly quicker than previous releases, which makes them much more attractive for LiveCD tasks than they were previously, and worth the 698 megs of download.

It’s out!

CDs

DVDs

Fedora Core 6 (Zod) Live-Spins Released

Fedora Unity Project has released Fedora Core 6 LiveCDs and LiveDVDs.

A Live-Spin CD or DVD provides a “reasonably useful web browser/email/OpenOffice access,” said Jef Spaleta, long time Fedora community member. It “should be a good quick peek at what the FC6 desktops feel like … without having to do a full install.” He added, “9 out of 10 voices in my head agree: ‘Unity’s Live-Spin CD is a pretty good starting point for future live CD development.'”

First Looks: Xen Demo CD 3.0.3

DistroWatch Weekly contains a review of the new Xen Demo CD.

Xen Demo CD is a bootable CD containing not one, but three Linux distributions – a recent build of Debian “etch”, SUSE Linux 10.0 and CentOS 4. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the wonders of virtualisation, or in less technical terms, the technology of running several operating systems (or several instances of the same operating system) simultaneously on the same machine.

Mandriva 2007 Review

This Mandriva 2007 review at Linux Forums has a short section involving the LiveCD install of the new Mandriva release.

I booted on the Mandriva One CD, noticed nice boot splash sequences, answered one too many questions about my favorite language, keyboard layout, home country, time zone, favorite time synchronization method, I signed a user license agreement and told Mandriva One I didn’t want to activate the 3D effects (I didn’t, because I wanted to keep that as a surprise for when it would be running from the hard-drive).

A Windows Users Delight: PCLinuxOS

Really Linux has an overview of PCLinuxOS.

PCLinuxOS offers the flexibility of being both a Live-cd, and including all necessary components for a full installation. As a Live-cd version it can boot directly from a CD drive without any installation to the hard disk. But more importantly, it includes an easy to use installer that allows you to fully install Linux when you are ready. Of course, as with many major distributions, there are excellent guides on the website for helping use the installer.

Super-Simple System Recovery

SmallBusinessComputing.com reviews Symantec’s Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition 6.5, which utilizes a Windows PE LiveCD to perform system restores of broken systems.

You probably don’t need to be told how important — make that critical — it is to regularly back up your company’s data. But it’s almost as important to have complete system backups as well, because desktop systems have become complicated beasts — containing updates and patches, user profiles, application preferences and myriad other customized settings. Restoring these can take hours or even days, during which time you have an unproductive employee.

Ubuntu Edgy Knot 3 Released

The latest testing version of Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, Knot 3, has been released. The biggest change is the move to upstart, which should eventually benefit every laptop user.

Common to all variants, we have changed the init system from the venerable sysvinit to upstart which is an event-driven init script system.