Langa Letter: A Must-Have Repair And Recovery Tool

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.com | Review: Slax 5.0.6

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.

Forensic Computers Releases Linux Based Computer Forensic System

There’s a new product being sold to law enforcement that allows easier collection of forensic data from computer. It uses a Mepis-based LiveCD.

“Windows will always try to interfere with everything and by contrast, on a Linux system, we can control when and how the file system is mounted, which adds an additional safeguard against writing to the drive while coupling that with a live CD to provide a very secure solution,” states Jim Raubach, Owner/Founder of Forensic Computers.

Gaming Router / Firewall

Lan Game Reviews has a good how-to guide for seting up a router that will allow you to play online games no matter who is on your network. They use m0n0wall for the LiveCD, no hard drive needed.

The next step is to enable Traffic Shaping. This is what prioritizes packets so you get great pings while downloading. Click on the Traffic Shaping button on the left menu bar, and click the Magic Shaper Wizard tab. Select the checkbox saying Set P2P traffic to lowest priority and input the downstream and upstream speeds for your connection.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.