Giant List Of Linux-based Live CDs

nick58b writes "After searching the Internet and not being able to find a list of all available Linux Live CDs, I decided to create one. In its current form, it attempts to makes finding a Live CD easy. There are nearly 100 Live CD distributions listed so far, with functions ranging from clustering to home entertainment, and ISO image sizes from 5 to 702 Megabytes."

Growing Distros

[Mork29]

Well, I know that some distro's can have installs of up to 2 or 3GB (ok, alot of that is source-code), but why aren't there any live DVD's? People really haven't explored this medium for distributing data. Many programs and games have still refused to switch over to DVD, despite it's wide usage in most new computers. Why is this?

We dont need more LiveCDs!

[Anonymous Coward]

If a see once more YALCD on Freshmeat or Distrowatch I am shove my CD-RW drive up the author's ass! (and run the eject command in the process)

There are too many of them, the more there are, the more fragmented they become and therefore less tested, resulting loads of crap cds with poor hardware dectection, buggy apps and does not bode well for Live CDs.

So if you want to make one, DON'T, help fix the bugs on the major ones, such as Knoppix and MandrakeMove, and let the other ones die unless they have a Good Reason to exisit (such as ClusterKnoppix or Knoppmyth) rather than just being a YALCD (Such as Mepis and Gnoppix)

Re:Growing Distros

[Ziviyr]

My wild guess is that CDs fit alot as is, and are much cheaper, which pays off with all the revisions. And DVD burners aren't as hugely common as CD burners. (also, compressed loopback was buggy at large sizes last time I heard it was tried)

A DVD would provide a stretched-limo kind of Live CD experience though. :-)

Re:Growing Distros

[segment]

cost factors... Think about that. A 7.99 DVD just to burn something you can BZIP into two .49 cd's. When you're free you're going to look to cut costs. *Nix distros unlike say VxWorks, Windows, Solaris (don't be a troll and answer with *its free to download*... I'm talking on a commercial level), QNX, etc, are making money SELLING as opposed to distros which charge to cover running costs.

Pretty nice list havent used Linux for a while though. Maybe I'll find a PPC version to play with for my laptop.

More than half based on Knoppix

[eadz]

Over half of these 100 "Distros" are Knoppix remasters. Here's a list of 60+ Knoppix remasters [knoppix.net]. The reason there are so many? It's very easy to make your own Knoppix remaster [knoppix.net]. I'm pretty sure many of these distros have 5 users if the're lucky.

Re:Growing Distros

[byolinux]

You're right, but what's to stop a GNU/Linux vendor from selling such a DVD?

It's easy for everyone to play the bandwidth argument, but the parent never suggested it was for download, just that it was available.

Re:We dont need more LiveCDs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, this is just a variant of the old "get your priorities straight" troll. If I want to create a live cd to fit my purposes I will do so, and make it available to other if I wish. Open Source developers don't cater to your whishes...

Re:only 702 MB???

[axxackall]

The size of DVD images can be too big: many sites would hesitate to publish it afraiding too many people would download it and crash their sites, while many users would hesitate to download it as it's too big for their DSL lines. Ironic, isn't it?

What would be a really a help for us, DVD-/+R/RW users is to have some sort sort of "LiveDVD HOWTO" describing how to build your own LiveDVD.

It could be useful for Gentoo users to burn it with all packages required and later use on the computer without a network (yes, sill there are such sometimes). Other Linux distros can benefit as well.

Also it could be useful to create a backup LiveDVD. Later it could be used to boot and restore the failed system.

It's a great list

[WegianWarrior]

Particulary if you, like me, are just poking into this Linux thing and want to test several different versions without having to invest in a sexond harddisk or get rid of my still fully working Windowns installation. I'll definitly be spending using a lot of my bandwidth to download some distros this weekend *smiles*

What I miss, however, is beeing able to see what minimum hardware requirement the various LiveCDs need without having to look at each one that looks interesting. Can't have everything I guess.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Think "applications"

[Anonymous Coward]

> - no history, no embarassment.

You know, history is actually a feature if you're not surfing porn...

Re:only 702 MB???

[Shillo]

> The size of DVD images can be too big: many sites would hesitate to publish it afraiding too many people would download it and crash their sites, while many users would hesitate to download it as it's too big for their DSL lines.

Duh! This is exactly the problem that BitTorrent is designed to solve! :)

--

History is repeating itself. Thin Client anyone?

[OlivierB]

Alright, I agree with pretty much everybody about the whole Read-only positive aspects of live CD. No Hard Drive , easier administration etc. BUt guys wake up. The industry has created an aswer to all this and it's called THIN-CLIENT. That,s right. On the local machine they run an os of some ROM or even better boot from the network. On one central server there is a shared drive, permissions for applications etc. I reckon that is the future of entreprise desktop. Do this remind AS/400 to anybody else but me? Is history repeating itself or what?

Re:Linux's Killer App?

[foobario]

You cut right through the fanboy cult rabidity that is often displayed by linux afficionados. The bottom line is that if you make it easier for the sheep to use, and more importantly you have an easy way to show them, on their hardware, how it works, they will use it. Dazzle them with the blinkenlights *first*, then work on the ideology. 'Free' as in anything confuses people sometimes, but empowerment vs sucking on the MS teat is pretty appealing. In the process, you might even make some of them stop being sheep.

Re:History is repeating itself. Thin Client anyone

[fishbot]

This is not the case. These CDs do not provide a thin client at all. All processing is done client side, and they can be used at any machine without a specific server.

With a thin client/terminal server system, you would have a fully running server which you could connect just about any hardware to. However, if you were down at the local computer shop and wanted to test compatibility, would you lug your server down there? How about if you were at a friends house and needed to fix a local HDD problem using a more useful program than DOS fdisk?

No, these CDs are NOT thin clients. They are temporary fat clients.

Re:Growing Distros

[dagar]

While bandwidth is a concern, why not put torrent list for all these live cds and live dvds? A legitimate use for BitTorrent.

Interesting Paradigm

[Ridgelift]

Remember when computers could only run one program? You'd grab a floppy, put it in the drive, then boot the machine? It was probably obvious to many, but I just realized that this is sort of a return to that. No worries about viruses, operating system is customized to the application(s).

I wonder what other "progress" in computers could be improved by using ideas from the past.

Re:We dont need more LiveCDs!

[silicon not in the v]

Welcome to slow computer country. Live CDs like Knoppix are great, especially for demo purposes or as a rescue disk, but they are not exactly fast, especially if you are starting larger programs.

I have a story about this one. I have a mostly-working Debian install (except my sound card), but I was running from a Knoppix CD to see if it could configure my sound card and then maybe I would be able to find out what drivers to set up for my real hard drive install. My wife came into the room, on the phone with her dad, and asked if I could pull up a web browser to find a page she wanted to tell her dad about. I answered, "Well, uh, OK." I clicked to open Mozilla, and as it chugged and chugged (300MHz machine with 192MB RAM) she tried to explain to her dad why it was taking so long.
"He's using Linux...It's another operating system that tries to copy what Windows does, but generally only computer-people use it because you have to write your own programs for it."
At this point, my Mozilla window came up, but the graphics were really distorted because Knoppix hadn't set up the S3 driver for my video card, so it was using vesa or fbdev. It was pretty much unreadable.
"Well, it's really slow, and most of the time stuff doesn't work...[to me:]Why do people use it anyway?"
I just said that I was a little too upset to answer right now. Later, we discussed why I was so upset about it. I told her that I was running the version from CD to diagnose something, so it's naturally slower and not as good as it's supposed to be. I said that it's like she had come up to someone who has a flat tire by the side of the road, and she asks for a ride. The person may say OK to try to be nice and help out, but while you're riding along, you're complaining about how this car has terrible ride quality and doesn't corner well and is really bumpy.
I am trying to learn to use Linux, but it has been a slow-going experience because I am doing it on our secondary computer that doesn't have great hardware. Even Windows doesn't auto-detect my ISA sound card, but it comes with a driver disk that makes it work. I could go spend the $20 each for a new video card and new sound card, but I figure I would like to learn more about how to overcome problems like this and how to search for answers to this stuff online.

Re:Wishlist... laptop power... ftp home dirs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Set me up to store my settings on an FTP server!!!! Accessible from anywhere in the world! Security (via username and password) built it.

You mean ssh/sftp, right?