Best live CD (DVD) distribution

[Jarod Wilson]

On Wednesday 10 October 2007 03:42:57 pm Ben Scott wrote:
> On 10/10/07, Karl <33karl at verizon.net> wrote:
> > Vista is one sick OS.  It may just be the crapware
> > installed, but it is slow and easily confused.
>
>   Bloatware is a huge problem.  If possible, I recommend a clean
> install from an OS disc without OEM-added bloatware.  (Whether that's
> an option depends on what the OEM gives you, and I don't know if the
> Vista licensing rules even allows that.)
>
> > What live CD (DVD) distribution would you recommend.
>
>   Of all the live CD distros I've tried, I've had the best luck with
> Ubuntu in the "just works" department (especially when it comes to
> laptops with wireless networking, which all seem to belong to the
> chipset-of-the-month-club).

Bleah. Ubuntu gusty is crapping all over itself on a ~2 year old Dell 
Precision 470 workstation right now... Corrupted bootsplash screen for 5 
minutes, then finally dropped to text console and said something about one of 
the services failing to start. After another 5 minutes, it finally got to the 
login screen, said user 'ubuntu' would login in 10 seconds. User logged in, 
and was promptly dumped, back to a message "Your session only lasted less 
than 10 seconds ..." (nice engrish there). Huh. I was going to suggest 
possibly a bad burn, but upon looking at .xsession-errors, I see a warning 
about some gtk+ stuff trying to run setuid, and it not being supported, and a 
refusal to initialize gtk+. Closely followed by 'Could not launch 
dbus-daemon', because dbus_daemon_pid != 0... Granted, its pre-release 
software, but ouch... So stay away from today's gusty, I guess. :)

> > Also, whatever live distribution I try, what would you recommend for a
> > dual boot setup.
>
>   Knoppix isn't (or wasn't) really designed for permanent install.
> It's focused on being a live CD, and updates are (were?) not that
> frequent.

I've installed knoppix to HD a time or two, and from there, just pointed apt 
at debian repos for updates. Might not be 100% kosher, but it worked for me 
at the time...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com