Live CD Recommendations?

[Siri Amrit Kaur]

On Wednesday 13 July 2005 07:20 am, Victor Odhner kindly wrote:
> 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 was going to recommend Kanotix- you beat me to it! It's the only 
live-cd I've ever used that had absolutely EVERYTHING working for my 
box without me having to fiddle with stuff. Once it installs it's 
actually Debian Sid, so you can just use the Sid package 
repositories.

For older hardware, SLAX might be good. It's based on Slackware. 

The other live-cd I really like is PCLOS. It was originally based on 
Mandrake but is now it's own distribution, sort of like Mandrake was 
originally based on Red Hat. It has mandrake's gui installation and 
control center, so it's very newbie-friendly. It has a wonderful 
selection of packages, security updates, supportive community, and is 
generally a well thought-out distro. That said, it has a few 
downsides:

It requires at least 256 MB RAM. You may want to check out minimum 
requirements for the processor. There's probably a light window 
manager alternative to booting into KDE if KDE runs sluggish.

It doesn't always load for some machines, but there are a lot of cheat 
codes you can use to get around boot hangs.

It uses the godawful Shorewall firewall that will never turns off 
listening to the printer port. I always uninstall Shorewall and 
install Guarddog. If you do that, make sure you read instructions for 
installing Guarddog in a Mandrake distro. It's been awhile, but I 
think there's a file or two you have to make in /etc/ppp. It's not 
hard to do.

HTH,
Siri Amrit

> ----------------
>
> 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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