LiveCD News

Sun has released the free OpenSolaris LiveCD. Includes all the interesting parts of Solaris, including ZFS, DTrace, containers, etc. Also, you can sign up to have them ship you a CD for free.

Phoronix has a review and pics of the first development release of OpenSolaris Project Indiana.

After downloading this ISO (the Developer Preview is only 629MB), the image can be burned to a disc and immediately booted. Project Indiana incorporates a “Slim Install” LiveCD for x86 systems. Just like Ubuntu, Fedora Live, and a number of other Linux distributions, you can boot to this CD and start using it without ever touching the contents of your hard drive.

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.

DistroWatch.com has news on the release of Scientific Linux 5.0 LiveCDs for i386 and x86-64 architectures. New features of these enterprise-based Linux distro LiveCDs are the ability to run off a USB drive and a hard drive installer.

OpenVZ is now available on a modified Knoppix 5.1.1 LiveCD. Test it out without messing up your installed OS.

OpenVZ is operating system server virtualization software technology, built on Linux, which creates multiple isolated, secure virtual environments on a single physical server – enabling greater server utilization and superior availability with fewer performance penalties. The virtual servers ensure that applications do not conflict and can be re-booted independently.

The new Python on Planes rapid development framework comes with a Live CD installer. Cool!

Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer officially debuting on the x86 platform.

DesktopLinux is reporting that Scientific Linux has released LiveCDs and DVDs for version 5, which is pretty much a demo of RedHat 5 without the branding.

VoiPPlanet introduces the AstLinux LiveCD as a quick way to get Asterisk running.

Download the live CD image, burn it to disc, pop it into a PC and boot up. If you enter the usbkd boot option, AstLinux will save data and configuration files to a USB device.

eWeek is reporting that Collax has released their latest offering in LiveCD form for customers to test.

The installation disk for Collax Business Server is freely downloadable and doubles as a LiveCD, so the product is rather easy to take for a spin.

All about Linux has the second review of the Xen Demo CD today. It includes some instructions on starting up a Xen instance.

DistroWatch Weekly contains a review of the new Xen Demo CD.

Xen Demo CD is a bootable CD containing not one, but three Linux distributions - a recent build of Debian “etch”, SUSE Linux 10.0 and CentOS 4. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the wonders of virtualisation, or in less technical terms, the technology of running several operating systems (or several instances of the same operating system) simultaneously on the same machine.

Gnuman.com has a review of the Slampp-Lite 2.0 server LiveCD.

Phoronix has some screenshots of SLAMPPLite LiveCD v2.0. This is one of the better server LiveCDs.

SLAX is announcing that version 5.0.8 is out. Unlike the last release, all the different SLAX versions (frodo, killbill, popcorn) have been updated, and the long awaited SLAX Server Edition has been released too. All include the 2.6.16 kernel.

DistroWatch reports that ParallelKnoppix has been updated.

EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet mentions the Xen Demo CD in an article about Xen.

NewsForge is reporting there is a new LiveCD which allows you to try out Open-Xchange without the need to configure anything.

All about Linux has a review of the OpenSolaris based BeleniX LiveCD. The review also points out some advantages to running Solaris over Linux, which look likely to stir up some debates.

I had always wanted to try out Solaris OS ever since Sun released its code under an open licence and renamed it as Open Solaris. But even though open solaris had its own website, downloading a binary image was an entirely different matter and was not an easy proposition.

Oops, missed this from last week, Gentoo released a new version of their LiveCD for SGI machines with support for more SGI hardware, like the SGI Origin fridge-sized computers. I would have tried a joke about nobody using old SGI hardware, except there are two Origins running across the hall of my office, happily (slowly?) performing web and DNS services.

DistroWatch has news about the delayed Knoppix 4.0.2 LiveDVD and 4.0.2 LiveCD. Also, info about a new LiveDVD which combines Xen and Knoppix.