News from the LiveCD World
LinuxPlanet has a review of Damn Small Linux.
At a mere 50MB, Damn Small Linux DSL seems like it would be more at home in the realm of rescue disks instead of Desktop OSs. After booting up into full graphical mode, you may be hooked on this tiny distribution forever. I am impressed with the number of applications and the fact that DSL has two choices for graphical interfaces Window Managers: Fluxbox and jwm see Figures 1 and 2. DSL is based on the Debian Linux distribution.
rBuilder Online has LiveCD ISO images of Foresight Linux with Gnome 2.19.92.
Put your mark on the upcoming OpenSolaris LiveCD. Project Indiana is looking for branding ideas, from the GRUB splash screen, to screensavers.
As our first prototype releases draws nearer, it’s time to start thinking about the branding experience for Indiana, specifically from when they put the LiveCD into their CDROM drives and launch the desktop to installing it on their disk.
Planet Sabayon Linux lets us know that the 3.4 LiveCD release of Sabayon Linux is coming soon.
DistroWatch Weekly has news that the next version of Puppy Linux will have so many changes, it will be awarded the version number of 3.0.
DesktopLinux.com has pics and news of Custom NimbleX 2, which allows anyone to customize and then download a LiveCD ISO of NimbleX. Get to it directly at http://custom.nimblex.net/ .
Lifehacker has a great set of instructions for using SystemRescueCD to create, move, and copy partitions on a normal PC.
This week’s DistroWatch Weekly compares two popular, lightweight LiveCDs aimed at partition management.
KDE 4.0 Beta 1 is out, and KDE Four Live has been updated with the new release. Download the ISO and check it out.
Wired gives credit to LiveCDs for the rise in the popularity of Linux desktop computing.
Part of this growth can be chalked up to the trend of the LiveCD, a bootable disk image that users can download and burn to a CD to test the software. Most of the popular Linux makers release software on LiveCDs, and many also ship physical CDs to curious users anywhere in the world for free or for a nominal fee.
Linux.com has instructions for backing up partitions using GParted-Clonezilla.
Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work — until youve tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands. And since Clonezilla is available as part of the GParted-Clonezilla live CD, you dont even have to install it.
Some interesting news from the Direct2Dell Blog, a Fedora based LiveCD has been created to help update the BIOS of your Dell. This is much nicer than having to install Windows or a floppy drive to grab a new BIOS.
Phoronix has an article on OpenSolaris “Indiana”, which is an installable LiveCD/DVD OpenSolaris distribution. Many of the cool Solaris technologies are included, such as ZFS. Look for a preview release in October, with a final build to be released in March ’08.
snorp.net has news of an openSUSE LiveCD Installer. Hopefully this makes it into the next LiveDVD, or they do what Fedora did and convert their 6 CD set into a single installable LiveCD.
DistroWatch Weekly has a review of the recently released Elive 1.0.
Elive has reach its first major milestone with its release of version 1.0. I’ve tested several versions of Elive over the last two years (or so), publishing my findings a few times. I haven’t published a report on Elive since 0.5 and things have continued to improve. I’ve been testing Elive 1.0 for several days and certainly agree that this release is worthy of the full first release status.
The screenshots page at SabayonLinux.org has been updated with shots of the upcoming 3.4 release.
The CentOS 5 LiveCD has been released.
That means that the purposes of this CD are to see if CentOS will boot/work on your hardware, to test some of the features of CentOS as a workstation, and to use as a Rescue CD. It does not contain all the features of the 7 CD CentOS 5 Distribution on one CD :
The InformationWeek Blog has a review of Hikarunix.
You want proof theres a Linux distribution for absolutely every possible application? Heres one for you: Hikarunix, a distro dedicated to Go players and based on the ever-versatile Damn Small Linux DSL.
Planet Sabayon Linux has screenshots of the new packages selector soon to be avilable in the Sabayon Linux installer.
DistroWatch weekely has an incredibly long review of one person’s experiences using Puppy Linux.
Most distro reviews focus on installing and using one release of a recent distro. But when people decide to stick with a distro, or abandon it after a longer period of use, the reasons are more to do with the entire distro experience, which includes the distro technology, its package management, the size and reliability of its package repositories, the ease and speed with which bugs are reported and fixed, the quality of the documentation, and the social experience of being part of the distro’s community, as exemplified by its forum and IRC channels. Here I relate my personal experiences with Puppy Linux over the course of approximately one year.