LiveCD News

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 Enterprise Magazine reports on MEPIS and answers the difficult question, what is the difference between SimplyMEPIS and ProMEPIS.

The second difference is that MEPIS is distributed as a live CD. This gives people a chance to test the distribution without having to install it on their hard drive. Users can make sure that MEPIS will work with their hardware before committing.

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.

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.