LiveCD News

SmallBusinessComputing.com reviews Symantec’s Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition 6.5, which utilizes a Windows PE LiveCD to perform system restores of broken systems.

You probably don’t need to be told how important — make that critical — it is to regularly back up your company’s data. But it’s almost as important to have complete system backups as well, because desktop systems have become complicated beasts — containing updates and patches, user profiles, application preferences and myriad other customized settings. Restoring these can take hours or even days, during which time you have an unproductive employee.

WhatPC has an introduction to open source, Linux, and LiveCDs using Damn Small Linux.

We will explain how to try Linux by running the operating system from a CD, not the hard disk, so there’s no need to abandon Windows.

DesktopLinux.com is reporting on the new lightweight Kurumin Linux LiveCD.

DistroWatch Weekly reviews the stable Sabayon Linux 3.0 release.

One new feature in SabayonLinux 3.0 is that hard disk installation is now available via the popular Anaconda installation program developed by Red Hat.

DesktopLinux.com has started a list of “especially interesting” desktop distributions. Most all of them are available in LiveCD or LiveDVD form.

The latest testing version of Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, Knot 3, has been released. The biggest change is the move to upstart, which should eventually benefit every laptop user.

Common to all variants, we have changed the init system from the venerable sysvinit to upstart which is an event-driven init script system.

DistroWatch is reporting the release of two popular LiveCDs, Sabayon Linux and Puppy Linux.

OSNews.com has a walkthrough of the TUD:OS, an experimental microkernel operating system.

To make the outcome of their research easier accessible to the non-OS-research public, on March 13th, 2006 the TU Dresden OS group has published a demo live CD

LiveCD News is currently being Dugg!

Announced in the latest DistroWatch Weekly, the latest GParted LiveCD has added support for moving partitions.

MadPenguin reviews Puppy Linux 2.02.

Lately, it feels like the world is being overrun with otherwise outdated PCs. With landfills overflowing with unwanted computers, it’s great to find that Linux developers have taken it upon themselves to offer a viable solution to simply throwing away older computers. In today’s review, we’ll look closely at Puppy Linux and how well it does from a compatibility point-of-view. Since a number of other reviews have already explained how well Puppy Linux can do with outdated hardware, we figured it might prove valuable to see how well Puppy Linux functions on newer hardware with the needs of today’s notebook user.

DesktopLinux is reporting on a review of PCLinuxOS done by ExtremeTech which we completely missed last week.

Although it suffers from an incredibly boring name, PCLinuxOS has a lot to offer desktop Linux users. It’s a shame that so much utility has to be obscured by a bland name—but hopefully the developers will decide to rebrand this distribution under a catchy name.

I never had a problem with the name, but then, it is quite different than Beernix.

LinuxPlanet has a review of Sectoo, a Gentoo based security LiveCD.

Rousseau wanted to make Sectoo Linux a lightweight system, in terms of minimal requirements. He said that 64MB or even 32MB of RAM should be enough to run Sectoo.

OSNews has a review of Syllable.

Syllable 0.6.1 is the latest incarnation of the operating system that “will be a reliable and easy-to-use GPLed operating system for the home and small office user” as their website states.

DesktopLinux is announcing a new LiveCD for KateOS.

“It [v3.0 Live] is a great demonstration of our system’s possibilities,” the Poland-based team said in the release announcement. “It can also come very handy when trying to rescue another system.”

ComputerWeekly.com mentions BackTrack as a quick way to run Kismet in their article on wireless security tools.

One of the first Linux distros to make its primary installation method a GUI app on a LiveCD, PCLinuxOS, now has an online magazine.

The latest DistroWatch Weekly is announcing the donation of $350 to the Puppy Linux project. The author of Puppy Linux responded that he will put the money towards hardware instead of pizza and coke.

Techgage has a review of the new Gentoo 2006.1. Included are many screenshots of the LiveCD and the GUI installer in action.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full six months since 2006.0 was released. Time indeed flies. The regular Gentoo release schedule is one per six months, and with this current release they hit the schedule dead on. This release doesn’t introduce anything major, but there have been many improvements that we will be getting into.