Tuxs.org published a mini-review of three Linux Live CDs: Damn Small Linux, Knoppix and PCLinuxOS.
A comparison of Three Linux Live CDs
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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…would be Kurumin Linux (http://guiadohardware.net/kurumin/). It’s very small (200M) and the lastest version (3.0) is very nice. Despite the size, it comes with all the goodies for the desktop user: flash, java, firefox, wine, etc.
It’s particularly good for portuguese-speaking people, but the english version looks OK too. The author (Carlos E. Morimoto) works very hard to make his distro the most user-friendly out there, including very throughout online documentation.
For the newbies he created something called “magic icons” which allow any program to be installed (or updated/uninstalled) with one click, works like a charm.
Comparing very different live distros is a commendable goal.
Scoring Knoppix (700m) and DSL (50m) the same (B+) makes the whole scoring exercise weird!
What about going beyond “they booted up on my system” and covering what each of them are trying to do and how they are meant to be used.
For example: Why is there no mention of DSL’s download scripts, booting toram option, saving and restoring user setting to floppy, HD or USB pendrive, myDSL application extensions etc.
What you are trying to do is a good thing but please finish the review!
Cheers
Rob
These live CDs are getting quite good now, but still none are ideal for marketing purposes to new users. For that it needs to be very simple with only a small selection of useful programs, a simple menu structure, simple boot options, and no dev-tools etc. For Software Freedom Day [1] 2004 we’ll be handing out thousands of copies of Linux Live CD around the world, so we are looking for something that fits the bill. See the SFD wiki [2] for more details about the CD requirements. We are now working on customising (simplifying) a version of Knoppix 3.4 for this purpose, but there is clearly scope for someone doing a pure marketing CD from the ground up (using existing technologies obviously).
[1] http://softwarefreedomday.org/
[2] http://softwarefreedomday.org/wiki/index.php/LiveCD:_Features
[3] http://www.theopencd.net/~henrik/sfd/shots/snapshot7.png
I am trying to find a LiveCD-distro which included Mono (pref 1.0), is there any? Google didn’t return anything useful.
There are some interesting simplified/smallish (>200m) live desktop CDs under development but none are close to the Pure Marketing CD you are looking for.
The SimplyMepis and proposed?? Roblimo book
http://www.pointandclicklinux.com/ may have some crossover points with your project. It might be worth contacting Warren from Mepis to see if you have similar or compatible goals ……….
Good Luck!
rob
Mandrake has a new LiveCD, Mandrake Move. I don’t know if it’s any good…
But it’s not free…. You have to pay for it.
gnoppix ( http://gnoppix.org ), in the 0.7 beta/rc (pretty recent), has gnome 2.6 and mono (and monodevelop), although i had to kill the process every time i tried to run monodevelop.
your milage may vary.
the mirrors list is here: http://www.gnoppix.org/pages/downloads/index.html
The only thing that bothered me about this review was the USB wireless adapter. He took a point away from each distro for not supporting it, but gave no indication that there was any Linux support for that part at all. Most of these USB-attached thingies don’t have drivers for any OS other than Windows, so expecting support seemed a little unreasonable. I usually find that you can only reasonably expect support for devices that are intended to be detected by plug-and-play without installing any drivers first at all.
Are Morphix, both LightGUI (XFCE) and HeavyGUI (Gnome).
The live-cd selection seems to be overwhelmingly KDE (which I hate) so these (and Gnoppix, but that one was at least not very good in May) were a welcome break. Particularly LightGUI, which runs very quickly on most any hardware.
Please refer comments about my preference for anything-but-KDE to the flamewar already running a few threads down
Yes, Morphix LightGUI is a real contender, but it’s now getting a bit dated with Firebird (!) 0.6, etc. The ideal thing would be a CD that booted KDE on 256MB machines and XFCE on low-spec machines. This would ensure a good experience for all. This cannot be that difficult.
Not too bad of an article. It was good timing since I plan on removing my Linux partition on my laptop fairly soon. Having a live CD will be a great way to still dink around in Linux from time to time while freeing up some much needed space for the Windows partition.
While it’s quite true that Knoppix will not configure wireless networking on boot, there are scripts in the Knoppix tool box that make wireless configuration possible once you are booted. In an “old style” install to disk these settings are retained. That is why I install Knoppix for people using wireless networking, and who want Linux. First, I see if I can get it working. Then, I install to hard drive. This was using the 17 May, 2004 version with kernel 2.4.26.
I’ve used DamnSmall Linux ALOT the past few weeks, especially when I am on the road, or over to a freinds house, where I don’t have access to my own Linux box. It’s VERY useable, I just love this distro of live cd! It’s nice to just carry my Fuji Key drive and a small cd, and people ask me what’s that? I can reply, my OS, hehehe.
I was also impressed with SLAX, although it does need some more work, I believe SLAX could be great, being SlackWare based and all.
I have yet to try the latest release of Knoppix. In fact I’m off to do that now.
It would be nice if someone wrote a small review for OSNews of this product: http://www.morphix.org/trom/whatis.html
Why can’t their be a live cd that uses XFCE 4? It is my favorite lite DE.
No there is no way DSL should get the same rating as knoppix
or pclinux it is very hard to get on the web on a dial up
pclinux and knoppix make it very easy, i have very a
standard and every thing else allows me to get on the internet even puppy linux which is very small gets on dial up
very nicely infact if you want more tools than DSL get puppy
it runs on ram by default.
as one here suggested (the 1st post), i tried kurumin. it’s a really nice live cd, but i couldn’t get the 3.1 version to book in english, and i can’t find an english version to download. kurumin defenitely is one of the best live cd’s i saw. now i want to actually try it
anyone know where can i get the english version?
Brad,
check out morphix lightgui…it uses XFCE
And Luitlinux 49.9MB
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/
My bad, I think you must install Kurumin on the hard disk to be able to change the language settings.