Linux Live CDs have been around for a while now, still I meet so many people who have never heard of them. I just met a friend who has been working on cross-platform C/C++ development for over a year now and is the Linux guru at his office but he had never heard of them.
In short, a Live CD is a bootable CD that brings up a full working operating system without installing anything on the PC’s hard drive. A good list of Live CDs is given here. For me it started with Knoppix which is full Linux OS with the KDE GUI desktop, OpenOffice, plus loads of software all running directly from the CD.
Knoppix is the parent of a lot of other Live CDs, so on a lot of LiveCD websites you will find the words “Knoppix spin-off”. You see what Knoppix achieved over other Live CD distros was its awesome ability to detect hardware automatically without bothering its user. It works great with even laptops. It also has 3GB worth of software compressed into one CD. If you are new to LiveCDs, please start with Knoppix.
So one might ask, why a LiveCD? I have seen different answers to this question on the net. I actually like the idea of carrying around my whole operating system with me on a CD and a USB disk to save my work. I am also a sysadmin. I know how often PCs go down. Norton Ghost has saved my life millions of times, where the same OS image file could be installed on various similar systems without any problems; configure once, install everywhere. With Live CDs I can configure once, run anywhere … without installation.
My intranet PDC server went down last week, filesystem got corrupt. I had my user/group/password, Samba, cups scripts all backed up. I just put in a live STUX Linux CD, booted into the OS, kept the scripts and files in their relative places and viola .. the server was back up again in 10 minutes. A reinstallation would have taken hours.
I plan to post more of my findings in LiveCDs as time goes on. So keep coming back for more …
In short, a Live CD is a bootable CD that brings up a full working operating system without installing anything on the PC’s hard drive. A good list of Live CDs is given here. For me it started with Knoppix which is full Linux OS with the KDE GUI desktop, OpenOffice, plus loads of software all running directly from the CD.
Knoppix is the parent of a lot of other Live CDs, so on a lot of LiveCD websites you will find the words “Knoppix spin-off”. You see what Knoppix achieved over other Live CD distros was its awesome ability to detect hardware automatically without bothering its user. It works great with even laptops. It also has 3GB worth of software compressed into one CD. If you are new to LiveCDs, please start with Knoppix.
So one might ask, why a LiveCD? I have seen different answers to this question on the net. I actually like the idea of carrying around my whole operating system with me on a CD and a USB disk to save my work. I am also a sysadmin. I know how often PCs go down. Norton Ghost has saved my life millions of times, where the same OS image file could be installed on various similar systems without any problems; configure once, install everywhere. With Live CDs I can configure once, run anywhere … without installation.
My intranet PDC server went down last week, filesystem got corrupt. I had my user/group/password, Samba, cups scripts all backed up. I just put in a live STUX Linux CD, booted into the OS, kept the scripts and files in their relative places and viola .. the server was back up again in 10 minutes. A reinstallation would have taken hours.
I plan to post more of my findings in LiveCDs as time goes on. So keep coming back for more …
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