Other Live CD's

**rolfhub** · 12-03-2005, 08:48 PM

Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman

Originally Posted by Kowood

can you write the disc to the hd instead of ram to make it run faster?

Kowood, this may come as a shock to you but ram is faster than hard disk.

Well, you are only half right here, of course, the RAM in a computer is always faster than the hard discs, but if you copy the whole CD image to RAM, you have left only a certain amount of RAM for the applications to use, but if you copy the whole CD image to HDD, you have as much free RAM, as if you would boot from a CD, but you have don't have to have the CD present the whole time, so it's kind of "best of both worlds" (as much free RAM as if booting from CD, while having one more free CD drive).

**poppe** · 03-18-2006, 09:52 PM

The trick is to make the HDD copy bootable from HDD. Also, I'm fairly (not 100%) certain that Knoppix comes with a script or application that allows for copying of the CD image to HDD.

**Harry Kuhman** · 03-10-2007, 11:55 PM

Another very nice Live CD that I just came across is Backtrack 2, available here. The focus is on security, but it still contains a fair assortment of the typical tools. And Knoppix could learn a lot from this Live CD, wireless networking seems to work great, even on computers that Knoppix doesn't begin to try to support.

**eionmac** · 04-07-2010, 09:18 PM

Nice to see old postings however I regularly use Knoppix , SLAX and Puppy, and on this year 2010 they are still as functional as ever.

**otropogo** · 04-09-2010, 12:26 AM

Originally Posted by eionmac

Nice to see old postings however I regularly use Knoppix , SLAX and Puppy, and on this year 2010 they are still as functional as ever.

Unfortunately, they are mostly also as unfunctional as previously. For example, Puppy Linux still can't mount a DVD-RAM disk. I'm not sure about Knoppix, because I've never had enough memory to load it into RAM and/or a second burner. I did try loading Knoppix 6.2.1 LiveDVD into memory on a system that has 4GB, and it wouldn't go....

Slax, OTOH, will load into memory on a 1GB system, freeing up the burner. And it will also read and write to DVD-RAM disks formatted UDF 1.5 (NOT 2.01, the default) in Windows 7.

I wish I could find a Linux LiveCD distro that uses the current kernel AND supports DVD-RAM and UDF.

**krishna.murphy** · 04-09-2010, 10:28 AM

Originally Posted by otropogo

Unfortunately, they are mostly also as unfunctional as previously. For example, Puppy Linux still can't mount a DVD-RAM disk. I'm not sure about Knoppix, because I've never had enough memory to load it into RAM and/or a second burner. I did try loading Knoppix 6.2.1 LiveDVD into memory on a system that has 4GB, and it wouldn't go....

Have you tried it on a USB-flash drive? I got an 8GB super-fast, super-tiny Verbatim drive on Amazon for <$30, delivered. The speed is acceptable and I have plenty of room for the persistent file (using 2GB.) Since I have BIOS trouble, I still boot off the DVD, but I can switch over to the flash and free up the burner to make DVDs, or transfer data to/from backups.

Slax, OTOH, will load into memory on a 1GB system, freeing up the burner. And it will also read and write to DVD-RAM disks formatted UDF 1.5 (NOT 2.01, the default) in Windows 7.

I wish I could find a Linux LiveCD distro that uses the current kernel AND supports DVD-RAM and UDF.

Good luck!
Krishna

**krishna.murphy** · 04-09-2010, 10:34 AM

Originally Posted by poppe

The trick is to make the HDD copy bootable from HDD. Also, I'm fairly (not 100%) certain that Knoppix comes with a script or application that allows for copying of the CD image to HDD.

Yes, it can done with (for instance)

Code:

knoppix tohd=/dev/sda1

the first time, and thereafter using

Code:

knoppix fromhd=/dev/sda1

if you don't mind the initial boot from CD.

Cheers!
Krishna

**coady** · 08-26-2010, 09:05 AM

Originally Posted by krishna.murphy

...if you don't mind the initial boot from CD.

If I do mind the boot from CD... then I must be able to copy the Knoppix ISO to a disk partition and boot it with Grub2 which will boot an ISO directly. I have used the 'tohd / fromhd' method in the past and its bullet proof, but it seems, today, that the Grub2 ISO boot would be nice. Any idea what kind of menu entry I would need to add to the Grub2 "40_custom" script to get it to work...?

Here's what I've tried but it gets stuck looking for a USB device

Code:

menuentry "Knoppix 2 ADRIANE V6.2.1 ISO (on /dev/sda1)" {
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,1)
loopback loop (hd0,1)/Downloads_BACKUP/adriane-knoppix.iso
linux (loop)/boot/isolinux/linux iso_filename=/Downloads_BACKUP/adriane-knoppix.iso ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=788 xmodule=fbdev initrd=minirt.gz nomce quiet loglevel=0 tz=localtime
echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
initrd (loop)/boot/isolinux/minirt.gz
}

Any ideas (or pointers about where to look) would be great! Thanks...

**krishna.murphy** · 08-26-2010, 05:37 PM

Does it work when it's booted from CD, without the encapsulation of the ISO format? Another option is to create a partition 1 you can then do your Knoppix "install" on - just use the flash-install script. It will set up booting from that as well as doing all the copying, etc. That script requires the use of partition 1, so you'd have to "move the existing partition 1" to another one of the slots with a partition table editor.

Cheers!
Krishna