Live CD Recommendations?

[Victor Odhner]

Update -- I fired up Kanotix this morning and it "just worked" for
sound (including MP3) and network.  It supposedly has an NTFS driver
that can safely write to NTFS volumes but it wasn't clear how to enable
it.  This is a Knoppix derivative with bleeding-edge features, and
requires i586 or better.  It seems much snappier than my previous
Knoppix experience.

What Live CD distros am I missing?

Vic

----------------

I am trying to evangelize a friend who's having troubles with sound
support under Windows.  He's running XP and Win98SE on an old box;
I gather his CPU is a Pentium II on a Pentium III board.

XP doesn't support any of the old sound cards he has tried.  I have an 
old sound blaster that might improve this situation, but we're also 
pursuing the Linux route because he's ripe for conversion.  I've burned 
several live CDs for him, but I'm looking for more since this is a good 
opportunity to look the field over.

He is ready to install Linux on a spare partition, but I want to 
demonstrate sound support using a live CD before we commit to a full 
install.

It's pretty cool how well these CDs are working, aside from the sound 
problem.  Of course nothing's perfect, and I'll be interested in any 
comments about the following three distros.

I just discovered ProMepis, and am highly impressed.  Everything seems 
to work -- I think this is the best Live CD experience I've had so far.  
I was sorry when they didn't recognize my 21" monitor, but it turns out 
they have a "Generic CRT" with 1600x1200 as one of the settings -- it 
wasn't so long ago I couldn't get any better than 640x480 on any Linux 
setup!   If anybody can advise me how to boost the refresh rate above 
60Hz, my weary eyes would be grateful.  With a little help previously 
from this List, I already had learned that Mepix comes with all channels 
on the mixer turned all the way down and also muted -- are they trying 
to protect me from blowing out my speakers, or what?

I tried the Ubuntu live CD - they do support sound, but have cleverly 
left out MP3 support.  Leaving out something that basic on a live CD 
seems really pointless.  If there's something non-free that they can't 
distribute, can't they at least provide a URL or some hint for pulling 
in the missing support?

My Knoppix live CD has a kernel that seems to be missing "modular sound 
support".  If anybody can point me to a sound-supporting ISO, I'd be 
really grateful.  Google took me to lots of success stories for sound 
under Mepis, so why would they put out a live CD that has sound support 
crippled?  Recompiling the kernel is not a great option in Live CD mode 
. . .  but I'm sure I'm missing some really basic point here.

I'd love to try any other live CDs that might work, for older 
equipment.  So please recommend your favorite . . .

I'm happy as a clam with my CentOS/KDE setup.  Haven't been back to XP 
for almost a week, and then only to keep the patches up to date!  ;-)

Thanks -- for everything.

Vic



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