News from the LiveCD World
For years Ubuntu has released a LiveCD (Desktop), LiveDVD (DVD), and text-mode installer (Alternate) for each release. For 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), Ubuntu is getting rid of these three images and releasing a single, 800 MB Desktop DVD image.
While their download sites still list this as the Desktop CD, it’s too large to be burned normally, so they’ll have to update the name.
See the announcement on their Email List. Also, check out coverage on OMG! Ubuntu!
Ubuntu 11.04 is out, grab the live Desktop CD in order to check out Canonical’s new GUI.
Canonical has announced the official release of Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal. This major update introduces the new Unity desktop shell, which is designed to improve ease of use and deliver a more modern user experience.
via Ubuntu 11.04 released, a Natty Narwhal rises from the depths.
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.
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.
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 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.
Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn is out, which means four new LiveCDs and two new LiveDVDs. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu all have Live “Desktop” releases to go with them.
Downloads:
Ubuntu 7.04 CDs
Kubuntu 7.04 CDs
Xubuntu 7.04 CDs
Edubuntu 7.04 CDs
Debian/Ubuntu Tips & Tricks has step by step instructions for copying an Ubuntu LiveCD to a USB flash drive. In the end you get a bootable flash drive, which can be used for installing Ubuntu on a computer without a CD drive, or getting the LiveCD experience with something you can fit in your pocket.
Ubuntu Tutorials shows how to save some time getting the daily builds of Ubuntu Feisty.
A great example of how LiveCDs can be used, this programming book comes with an Ubuntu LiveCD with all the code examples and code editors installed and ready to use.
There’s a live CD included so you can boot up Ubuntu Linux and see all the projects – not only view and play with code snippets via the Bluefish programming editor (noticeably superior to the text editor I’ve been using to write my PHP), but also running the final applications off the disc.
TablePCReview has success with an Ubuntu LiveCD on an Acer Tablet PC.
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.
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.
The Linux Newbie compares 11 different LiveCDs in this article. One interesting piece of information included is boot times for each of the LiveCDs.
DesktopLinux.com has a quick review of a book which comes with an Ubuntu LiveCD.
DistroWatch Weekly has a quick summary of new LiveCDs from Ubuntu, Debian, and SLAX.
Manila Standard Today has an intro to Linux via the Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD.
OSDir has recently posted many screenshots of new releases, here they are:
Notice the installer icons on the desktops of all the *buntu screenshots.
The final version of Dapper Drake has been released, and with it comes new LiveCDs for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. They include GUI hard drive installers on the desktop, and have been named “Desktop” CDs to differentiate themselves from the text installers.