LiveCD News

OSDir has screenshots, and Distrowatch has a review of the new Onebase Linux LiveCDs.

Electrontictalk has a story on a company whose Linux-based product is now being shipped with a modified Knoppix. It apparently allows use of their Linux-based data acquisition product from any computer with a CDROM drive. Sounds like an extremely intelligent idea, they now have a product that can be used with minimal effort.

This card can be used to turn a laptop PC into a digital oscilloscope.

Incite Technology is committed to the open source ethos and has made all software, firmware and even circuit diagrams available to the open source community via COMMEDI.

According to this weeks Gentoo Weekly News, Gentoo now has an Itanium LiveCD which will be released as part of Gentoo 2005.1.

The new LiveCD will allow users to quickly and painlessly deploy Gentoo on an IA64 platform, where previously another distribution was required to jumpstart the bootstrap process for a Gentoo installation.

WHAX 3.0 is out. A lot of changes, and the first stable release of since it switched from being Whoppix.

Finally! Whax is stable enough to leave the beta stage and go public.

I setup a new poll in the LiveCD Forums for everyone to vote for their favorite security LiveCD. Votes will show up on the LiveCD List, so go vote and help others figure out which security LiveCD they should download first.

NewsForge reviews KnoppMyth. While most people are aware that KnoppMyth simplifies creating a MythTV box, one feature not widely known is that it can be used as a LiveCD with a MythTV frontend.

Frontend — This lets you use the KnoppMyth machine as a pure front end that connects to a MythTV server you have running. This is useful if you have a couple of TVs, or are already using MythTV. After setting the date and time, you have to enter database settings, after which Knoppmyth starts up as a pure front end to your MythTV server. This is the quickest way to get going, but it does require a previously configured server. You don’t need to do any partitioning, and you won’t lose any data on your hard drive. It’s basically just a live CD front end.

ONLamp.com has a new article on creating an OpenBSD LiveCD. Don’t forget to read the second page, where the author describes how to configure a firewall/router on this LiveCD. And you thought OpenBSD made a secure firewall before it was read-only.

This article describes the process I used to create a Live CD based on OpenBSD/i386 3.7-current. It should be no problem with 3.7-release either.

Damn Small Linux 1.3 has been released. There is a new desktop theme along with the many bugfixes. See the Release Notes, and even more detail about the changes.

What was once a CD full of open source Windows applications has now morphed into a hybrid LiveCD/Windows software CD. While it has not finished downloading for me yet, it looks like a lot of work went into this CD, and I’m excited to give it a try.

TheOpenCD traditionally provides a handy collection of quality FOSS applications for Windows, professionally presented in an elegant CD browser. This latest edition also lets you boot into a highly polished desktop based on Ubuntu for a taste of the world of free operating systems!

I guess there is news today. OSDir has more of their famous screenshots, this time for PCLinuxOS 9.1.

Also, regarding those screenshots, there is a new version of PCLinuxOS out. It is Preview 9.1.

Since there’s no LiveCD news today, I’m going to suggest everyone go download and try out Elive and GoblinX. Both LiveCDs focus on the Eye Candy factor of Linux desktops, and both do this well. Elive has Enlightenment E16 and E17, and GoblinX has 5 pre-tweaked desktop environments, including KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and Enlightenment.

When you’re done, go vote for the LiveCD you think is the best for showing off Linux to your Windows and Mac friends.

The Latest Linux Gazette has an article about getting Knoppix to boot off a USB device via floppy. Sounds odd at first, but I have several older computers with USB ports but without BIOS options to boot from them.

Both OpenBits and LinuxTracker are listing torrents of the LinuxTag version of the Knoppix 4.0 DVD which have been remastered to default to English instead of German, and also include Qemu, for the ability to run the DVD on top of Windows (without rebooting).

digg has a note about the soon to be released SLAX Server Edition. The SLAX download page has a screenshot from the software, but the download has not yet been released.

Wow, not much LiveCD news today. The LiveLAMP release has already been posted, but there is another announcement that Groklaw is covering. This time they’re putting a $10,000 value on the OSS software they’re including on the CD.

A paragraph on Puppy Linux: deccanherald.com

Flavio’s TechnoTalk has one of the first in depth Knoppix 4.0 LinuxTag DVD reviews. It includes a good number of screenshots and talks about changes since version 3.9.

This time, Knoppix 4.0, also known as ‘maxi’, is released on DVD, so that many more applications can be included. The obvious advantage is that you don’t need to spend time downloading and installing your favorite applications.

I received the latest issue of Wired and the biggest words on the cover, besides “WIRED”, was “REMIX NOW!”, indicating that this issue would be devoted to the huge amount of remixing the web has seen recently. It actually covered a lot more than I expected. There were many music and movie references, but it also included video games, writing, cars, shoes, ipods, etc. This got me to thinking, what else could be a remix, and it didn’t take long until I started thinking about LiveCDs. If any type of remix deserves a place in this issue of Wired, even just small box, it would have to be the Knoppix LiveCD. Being a derivative of Debian, Knoppix itself has easily over 100 derivatives, from bioknoppix to Whoppix. Knoppix also has credit given to it by Damn Small Linux, a LiveCD which weighs in at under 50 MB, and has several (six I think) derivatives itself. So, for example, one branch of this remix tree goes: GNU/Linux software -> Debian -> Knoppix -> Damn Small Linux -> ELE.

I now view this as a glaring omission from an otherwise great issue. Is Wired even aware of Knoppix? Why does a search for Knoppix on Wired’s website bring up zero hits? Isn’t the ability for anyone to remix an OS easily and distribute it to the world in a form that anyone can test out 5 minutes after downloading worthy of some kind of mention?

The Beer Files has news of a new Linux LiveCD dedicated to setting up working enviroments for schools to give their students. It does not appear to be released yet, but looks like a great use of a LiveCD.

According to OSV, LiveLAMP can turn any PC into an instant server capable of supporting up to 1,000 students doing work on over a dozen programming languages and hundreds of development tools.

Whoppix, the security LiveCD with great flash tutorials on its website, is going through a big change. While it was based on Knoppix, it will now be based on SLAX. The name has changed to support the change, from Whoppix to WHAX. Makes sense to me.

The new website, with the release announcement.
Detailed info in a PDF