[K12OSN] K12LTSP Live CD?

[Petre Scheie]

The question of a K12LTSP live CD has come up before, but I don't think anyone has 
pursued it to the point of actually creating such a disk.  While it would be an 
interesting project, I think the objective is usually to allow anyone to try out 
K12LTSP.  But to really appreciate its brilliance, it needs to be installed on the hard 
drive for performance reasons. The way to knock people's socks off is to show them 
Firefox, OOo, etc. all running like lightning on an old Pentium 150; I don't think 
you'll get lightning speeds with Knoppix.  Knoppix is great because it allows you to 
carry all your linux tools with you, and it demonstrates the creative things people can 
come up with when there is software freedom, i.e., no licensing hassles. But the 
speed/performance of Knoppix is sometimes underwhelming since it runs from the CD.  The 
person asking about a live CD usually wants an easy way for others to see K12LTSP in 
action, but after considering the above limitations of live CDs, decides a laptop would 
be a better portable server, that he/she can carry around to demos, etc.

With that said, to anyone still interested in a k12ltsp live CD, I would suggest 
building it on Puppy Linux since it is designed to load entirely into RAM and as such, 
all the apps load & run very quickly.  You can even remove the CD after it's booted up. 
  The problem you'll run into is that the top-line apps on k12ltsp--OOo, Firefox, 
Thunderbird, Evolution, TuxType, etc.--would require a significant amount of RAM to 
store, let alone run.  So, to be able to load all that at boot will require a pretty 
hefty machine, which may not be conveniently available for many.  OTOH, with RAM now 
available for $100/GB, perhaps this isn't so exotic.

Petre

William Fragakis wrote:
> Other than Knoppix for Kids, has there been any effort to make a 
> k12LTSP-ish live CD. We are considering rolling our own but given our 
> inexperience, no sense in re-inventing the wheel. We'd like to pile in 
> as much of the software on the k12LTSP project (within the constraints 
> of 700mb).
> 
> Thanks much,
> William Fragakis
> Morris Brandon Elementary
> 
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