Is it the End of the Road for Live CDs?

Free Software Magazine asks if the era of Live CDs is starting to wind down. I personally can’t see this happening until USB flash drives are as inexpensive as CD/DVD media, and even then, the era of Live USB flash drives will be flourishing.

I was window shopping in a high street electronics store a few days ago. I was delighted to see a shelf display full of netbooks from vendors like Samsung, Acer, Dell, Advent and Asus (of course), to name a few. It looked like the Asus EeePC had launched an idea whose time had come and in the process possibly heralded the long withdrawing roar of the live CD.

How to run Linux from a USB drive

TechRadar takes Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10 and installs them on USB flash drives.

You’ll need a flash drive with at least 1GB of free space, and ISO images of either Ubuntu 8.10 or Fedora 9. It’s likely there are other distros out there that work with similar or perhaps even identical instructions, but Ubuntu and Fedora are the big two so we stuck with them.

Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems

Lifehacker took four Linux distros, put them on USB flash drives, and ran a Lifehacker Faceoff.

Today we’re detailing four no-install distributions—Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora—and helping you decide which might work for that spare thumb drive you’ve got lying around, or as just a part of your multi-gig monster stick.

7 Uses of GParted Live

LinuxHaxor.net has a list of useful tasks for the GParted LiveCD.

We all fill up our hard-drives from time to time, but thanks to Gnome GParted, rearranging disk partitions isn’t as terrifying as it used to be. In fact, armed with a GParted Live CD, there’s a swathe of disk space fiddling jobs I can tackle without gnawing my fingers to the bone:

Puppy Linux 4 gets new bite

Tectonic takes a look at the new release of Puppy Linux.

Its been been six months since Puppy Linux 3.01 was released and today Barry Kauler announced Puppy 4.00, aka Dingo. Clocking in at a minimal 87MB download, Puppy 4.00 is a lightweight desktop Linux alternative ideal for low-end machines, or for users who want a little less clutter and more speed from their desktop.

How to make a live CD/DVD from your harddisk installation

Highlighted by the latest Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (#88), there’s a great tutorial in the Ubuntu forums for transforming an Ubuntu install into a custom LiveCD/DVD.

This HOWTO is about making a live CD/DVD from the main system on your hard drive. This might be desired if you have customized your system and want to have it on CD. It can be useful also if you want to create a recovery CD from scratch, as you can make a minimal system using debootstrap and transform it into a live CD.

Jeremy Katz on Fedora Live CDs

Red Hat Magazine has an interview with Jeremy Katz of Fedora, about Live CDs.

In Fedora 9, one of the new features is persistence for Live USBs. Based on the impression I get, this is a feature that is in high demand and probably has quite a number of uses. Where did your motivation for working on this feature come from; was it the demand from the users, or were you scratching your own itch?