What Is Live CD

[Dude500]

What is a live cd?

[dylunio]

A live cd is a linux which is compressed from about 2GB to the 700mb cd size IIRC.

It dosn't interact with the hard drive, other than reading it, so it dosn't install, you just boot from it and you have a linux distro, examples are Knoppix and SLAX, but there are many more.

They are great for testing linux, traveling to work and such with linux without breaking the other OS's by accident that are at work, and great if you've messed up your installed linux,

You can also get live distros on flash cards and mini cd's


dylunio

[sealfood]

I'll just add that live Cds can also be used as rescue Cds for Windows systems (ok, that raises the obvious question of why anyone would want to rescue a Windows system rather than put it, and its user, out of misery) but sometimes one just needs to. I've used Knoppix and the Live version of Mandrake 'Mandrake Move' , to repair Windows systems. This week I used MM to solve a problem with an old hard drive that didn't want to be loaded with Windows 2000 Profesional version. Incidently, MM is exceptionally useful as a rescue CD.

It is not only Linux users but also Windows users for whom Linux live Cds are indispensible.

[smindinvern]

I've also found knopix especially useful as a host system for compiling from scratch, because of the fact that it has all the development tools. It's also very good as a rescue CD.