The best Live CD

[Andrew Konosky]

regatta wrote:

>Hi
>
>I am sorry to send this question to fedora list but I have a small
>question I hope if someone can answer me.
>
>I want to know what is the best (small) live CD for Linux
>Administrator that include all the administrator needs (Network,
>Hardware check tools....etc)
>
>I hope it be less than 200 M so I can keep it in my pocket :)
>
>
>  
>
Actually, he's talking about DSL Linux. DSL is based on Knoppix, but is 
a smaller (50mb) distribution for slower computers. Knoppix is the 
'unoffical' LiveCD of Debian linux, and it is a full CD which uses KDE. 
Then there is the SuSE 9.1 LiveCD.

I have been using RedHat 8/9 and now Fedora and have never really used 
any other distributions. I did download those 3 different Live CDs to 
test out, and they all work pretty well. The only problem I ran into is 
that the SuSE Live CD didn't detect the USB mouse on my friend's 
computer, but when we installed SuSE from the install CD, yaST detected 
it just fine. After setting up my friends computer, I'd have to say that 
SuSE is a very good distribution, and I like the YaST configuration 
program very much. SuSE only comes with Konqueror web browser though, so 
you have to download Mozilla or something.

The Knoppix live CD comes with both Konqueror and Mozilla, which is what 
I use mostly. They both use KDE, which was a change for me since Gnome 
is default for RedHat and Fedora. It has about the same selection of 
Office, interet, audio, and video programs as Suse, but its just a 
different flavor of Linux. I like the colorful text in the startup 
screen and how you don't have to configure automount to mount hard drive 
partitions. The problem I ran into with Knoppix was that it couldn't see 
my LVM volume that Fedora is installed on. It mounted the 75gb LVM 
partition on hdb and the 30gb partition on hda, but I still couldn't 
access my files on Volume00. I didn't try under SuSE, so I don't know if 
SuSE can do it or not.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) can do most of the stuff the other two can, but 
it is a stripped down version. It runs Fluxbox window manager and 
doesn't have a lot of graphical eye candy, but it's meant not to for 
running on slow systems. It is very capable, but you want to know how to 
use the command line. It can be installed to the hard drive like the 
others, and it has an update program so you can download more 'extra' 
programs that didn't fit in the 50mb distribution.

http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/ftp/live_eval_int.html
http://www.knoppix.org/
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/