[BLU] Re: Linux that stays on a CD?

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Sat, 8 Sep 2001 bpmedley at 4321.tv wrote:

> On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Duane Morin wrote:
>
> > Sometimes I hear this spoken of as one of the holy grails of Linux development
> > -- a Linux distribution that just boots from CD and stays there.  The idea, of
> > course, being that you can tell somebody "Look, you can temporarily check out
> > Linux without having to do all that icky repartitioning stuff."  But, games or
> > no, does such a beast exist?  I'd love to have a couple lying around to show
> > off (frinstance next time I'm at my dads house just pop it in and say "Hey,
> > try it for a little while). Kinda makes me sound like a drug dealer, but, you
> > know, in the *good* way. :)
>
> I believe suse has something that does mostly what you want.  I've never
> tried it, but it is available here:
>
> ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-7.2/

The Suse one is pretty good.  Also check out
http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+live+cd
for many more.

To answer your other question, the main issue with making "live Linux"
CD's is separating out the files that have to be writeable (config files,
spool files, mail, state files, etc.) from the ones that can stay
read/write, and loading the ones that have to be writeable into some
writeable medium.  Some use a ramdisk.  I believe the Suse distribution
creates a filesystem in a single file on your Windows partition.  It may
be quite large, but it means you don't need a huge ramdisk.

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DDDD   David Kramer                   http://thekramers.net
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DKK D  Working with UNIX is like wrestling a worthy opponent.
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