LiveCD News

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.