Is Live CD safe??

[Buck1]

Okay you can tell this is comeing from a n00b.

But is Live CD that i download and put on to my pc safe? I dont want to do anything to windows at all. Im very worried it might do something to windows. I know what windows can be like.

So can you tell me wether or not my OS is safe and nothing at all will happen to it if i run Live CD.
Thanks very much

[firebyrd10]

Your completly safe. The cd doesn't even touch the hardrive unless you tell it to. Even then you have to go thorugh an extra step. But if your worried just take the drive out.

If the drive is NTFS knoppix won't even let you write to it. (Unless you force it to via command line)

[Cuddles]

Buck,

Fair question, and rightly, concernable...

When it comes to using the Live CD, and just BOOTING the Live CD, running the Knoppix OS from the CD, and not "saving" anything to any of your hard drives, it is SAFE.

Using the Knoppix Live CD is about as unsafe as playing a AUDIO CD in your computers CD DRIVE - about as safe as you can get...

When you boot the Knoppix CD, it will create a "memory" resident RAM drive, to store the OS, and any of its configurations, thus, when you shutdown, or reboot, the memory is released and all of its contents are evaporated. When Knoppix boots, all hard drives on the system can be mounted (openned, loaded, etc...) as READ-ONLY, and unless you want to cause problems with your Windows setup, you might want to NOT mount, or view, your Windows hard drives.

When you consider the Knoppix Live CD, booting off the CD, and running "strictly" off the CD, it is about as SAFE as SAFE can be... No virus issues, no worms, no security issues, etc... Since the best any virus could hope for is to get installed into the OS, it can't even get that far, all it would do is attach itself to memory, which, when you reboot, is completely flushed of its contents, it is pretty durn safe.

DISCLAIMER
This does not mean that if, during the booting, or running of Knoppix that you couldn't have hardware failure, a hard drive crash, a monitor go south, etc... it just means that Knoppix itself won't touch your hard drive installation of any OS, unless you tell it, or ask it to. That is about as safe as you can get.

From what I understand, the Knoppix Live CD was created for someone who just wants to "explore" Linux/GNU, without having to "give" anything up, or add it, etc... to there system. It also is a full blown installable OS, which, if you decide you like it, it can be installed on your hard drive just like Windows. I think the Knoppix CD is the "next generation" of "shareware" - but at the OS level. Try it, you like it, install it. You don't like it, just pull out the CD, and nothing lost in the deal.

But, as far as being safe, I would rather trust "Knoppix" on my system, even the Live CD, before I would trust Windows -=o=- IMHO

Hope this helps,
Cuddles

[Buck1]

Ok im gonna try it
thanks for all your help guys ^_^

one more thing and i think il be able to manage it.
on this page ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.uni...linux/knoppix/
is all i have to do is download
KNOPPIX_V3.3-2004-02-16-EN.iso
or do i have to download more??

[Cuddles]

Buck,

Download the ISO, and possibly the checksum (md5 or is it m5d???) -=- then burn the ISO to a cd as an IMAGE in your burning software. Then the CD will be bootable....

the ISO file is a CD Burner IMAGE - someone used the "write to file" from a burner program, so you use the ISO file to re-burn that image to the actual CD.

That should be it...

Cuddles

[plarts]

I want to try Linux on a bootable CD,
on the same PC running windows.
I suppose, I can add a hard drive reserved for Linux which I will
mount when running Linux, and unused on Windows ?

Can I run PHP and MySql above this Linux on CD ?

Thanks for answers.
Pierre.