For those not in the know, there has been a growth recently in Linux LiveCD distributions. These consist of a bunch of Linux applications and a kernel burnt to a CD which are designed to run entirely from CD without any hard disk installation.
Of these, Knoppix is the most famous and it is the version 3.6 Knoppix I am looking at here. Available FREE from LinuxISO.org and other Linux mirrors.
Why Linux LiveCD?
Well really, does it make sense?
These products come into their own in the following circumstances:
[ul]
[li]Temporary use of a Windows machine for Linux
[/li][li]Demonstrations of software on any machine
[/li][li]Emergency boot disks for disaster recovery
[/li][/ul]
But the big question is: do they work?
[u]Run 1: Typical Windows desktop[/u]
Hardware:
CPU - AMD XP2500+
Board - NForce 2
Graphics card - ATI 9500 Pro
Disk - Maxtor 120G IDE
I inserted the Knoppix CD and it booted fine.
The system booted to a KDE desktop showing me that the system had detected the following:
[ol]
[li]Sound
[/li][li]Video
[/li][li]Network
[/li][li]USB
[/li][li]Firewire
[/li][li]SATA controller (unused)
[/li][li]Mouse & Keyboard (including scroll wheel)
[/li][/ol]
I was able to access the Windows partition (NTFS) immediately. The Windows disk was already mounted as /mnt/hda1 and so I could access all files and directories with no further effort on my part. If I needed to get data off this disk but couldn’t due to a screwed Windows install, this CD would have allowed me to do it.
To remove the files I could use a flash disk - mine was immediately recognised when insterted and automounted on /dev/sda1. Or I could have burnt stuff to CD - Knoppix was well aware of the DVD burner attached to the machine. And there’s always good old floppy - the system recognised the built-in drive and also a USB version when plugged in. I don’t have a USB ZIP drive to test, but I wouldn’t mind betting this would have been recognised too.
The system recognised the network card immediately and got an IP via DHCP from my router. This allowed me access to the home network - including SAMBA and NFS shares already in place, plus the Internet using either Konqueror or Mozilla.
Openoffice was available, giving access to all my documents on the network. Even better, Wine is preinstalled (Wine is a Windows emulator) and found the WindowsXP installation on the disk to use. I tried a few programs with varying success, anything really tied to hardware e.g. WCPUID didn’t want to know, Winamp played fine (version 2.91), Acrobat Reader (version 5) OK… I guess if I just needed to run the odd program this would have been fine, but too slow/clunky for constant use.
Winamp brings me to multimedia options, all the usual are there, including Xine which is one of the best. No need to pass up on your multimedia collection then.
Overall, I was impressed. The system is quite quick, apart from initially loading large apps (like OpenOffice), but once loaded performance is good. There’s enough there that I could maintain the system if I liked, or just temporarily hijack it to play with Knoppix. And of course, as USB stick drives are recognised, I could use the system to crunch DC projects which are not machine-dependant (Like D2OL) 
I’ve posted an image of the desktop from the hijacked machine - a bit messy bit it gives you an idea of what is there.
