From the mind
of the Motor.

USER:
Not logged in

warmotor.homelinux.com content:

REGISTER A NEW USER

CHANGE USER INFO


MUST-HAVE FREEWARE

THE LINUX LIVECD

SMYTHE FAMILY PHOTOS

MP3 PLAYER





ESSENTIAL LINKS:

Damn Small Linux

Slax

Wizard's KidSafe



Linus’ Greatest Gift:
The LiveCD.


What is it?

A LiveCD is an OS (if you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’re probably using Windows, which is an operating system, or OS for short) that runs completely from a removable source such as a CD or DVD. A good LiveCD will likely have a user-friendly interface that is laid out in a fashion similar to what you’re already used to.

While I suppose that a LiveCD could technically be any flavor of any operating system, the term has been coined specifically for an OS called Linux.

Why would I need it?

  • You’re Looking to give a big "F YOU" to old Billy Gates and his evil reign of terror, or you’d like to play with Linux without installing or committing to anything
  • You’d like to be able to take your OS on the road with you and access the applications you need at any PC with a CDROM drive or USB port
  • You need to be able to boot your computer and retrieve data even if your hard drive or critical OS files take a sudden crap on you
  • You’d like to use the internets without leaving any sort of trace files or passwords when you are done
  • You’d prefer to boot straight to media that you’ve archived (like a movie player or game emulator) without the hassle of logging into an installed OS
  • You want to be able to do whatever you like on a system that you may not otherwise have administrative rights on
  • There are people using your PC other than yourself and you need a safe way for them to work or play without risk of viewing or corrupting your sensitive files

If you were so inclined, you could take some stripped-out old junker that didn’t even have a hard drive and pop in your favorite LiveCD… Bang, you’ve got a fully functioning PC. Very no-hassle.

DSL: The Original LiveCD

The DSL stands for Damn Small Linux, and they ain’t kidding. After packing in a full graphical interface (a high-res, full color desktop environment), and the entire package takes up less than 50 megabytes! That is small enough to fit on the smallest USB drive you can find, or one of those business card-sized CDs.

Kind of makes the now-standard multiple-gigabyte installs of Windows seem a little bloated, doesn’t it?

DSL Includes:
  • 3 Web browsers, including Firefox
  • An MSWord-compatible text editor
  • An Email Client
  • Image viewing and editing software
  • File and window managers
  • An Instant Messenger
  • VOIP (internet phone)
  • Spreadsheet Software
  • PDF support
  • A Fully functional media player
  • CD Burning software
  • A Webserver
    • There are also some misc. widgets, a calculator, etc. All of this stuff and the OS to run it all in such a tiny package (50mb!)

    Since DSL is so insanely lean, it will run on pretty much any PC you can find. Even on the oldest of systems, it boots pretty quickly and has automatically detected every combination of sound and video hardware I’ve thrown at it thus far.

    Running such a lean distro sounds like a walk in the park, but there are a few drawbacks. As of this writing, DSL doesn’t support shared drives over a Windows network and won’t read or write to an installed hard drive. This can be a good thing if you’re letting your ten year old nephew look at his myspace page, but pretty much renders DSL useless as a data recovery tool. While there is a large community of DSL users and modders out there, adding software to your DSL disk is difficult for a non-Linux expert.

    which brings us to…

    SLAX: The Evolution of the LiveCD

    For a little bit more disk space (around 200 megabytes) you can boot to the standard edition of SLAX. The user interface is prettier, in fact as far as pure aesthetics go I prefer it to anything Microsoft has to offer. Like most modern KDE-based desktops, it's apparent that the developers of SLAX made a significant effort to make the look and feel comfortable to those people that have never strayed from Microsoft-based systems.

    I remember when I first fired up SLAX on my primary PC to test it out; it gave me access to all 5 of my hard drives (1 IDE, 4 SCSI, all Microsoft NTFS) as well as automatically detecting the shared drives and directories on my other Windows computers. Not even WindowsXP integrates itself into a Microsoft network so quickly and easily. Digging a little deeper, it soon dawned on me that aside from gaming I could easily replace Windows with the humble CD spinning in my drive and not miss a beat. It was a good feeling.

    I could outline the software and features of SLAX, but I'd be wasting my time. The true genius of this distro is how modular it is. Drivers, games, software of every flavor is available for free directly from the SLAX website. You have to find software that will open an .ISO file to plug these modules in, but once you get that figured out installing new stuff is as easy as dragging and dropping. The SLAX community, as well as my personal favorite, CDBurnerXP are both working on a free .ISO editor; here's hoping they it figured out soon, I'm lucky enough to have access to a corporate copy of ISOmagic.

    Once I got started making different copies of SLAX for different uses I couldn't stop. I added Windows and DOS emulation to aide in data recovery. I added ATI graphics drivers so I could play a few 3D games in OpenGL. Network security and 802.x sniffing software, OpenOffice, Mplayer media player, If you can use it in Windows there is a Linux equivalent and odds are you can find a version for SLAX.

    Wizard's KidSafe: A Niche Filled

    A flavor of PCLinuxOS (a particularly Windows-like distro), this LiveCD is loaded down with safety nets to keep bad stuff away from kids, and kids away from your important files. The KidSafe CD will boot straight to the desktop, but requires a password to shutdown (to keep the little ones from pulling the CD out and booting to your primary OS). While the OS is smart enough to see and mount other drives, access to them is tightly restricted.

    As far as content, the development team of KidSafe must have scoured the Linux community to find every quality, free educational game out there. There are literally dozens of built-in activities to keep grade-school kids busy for hours. My only complaint here is that while testing the games I came across several that didn't fully work or refused to work at all. I have little doubt that a newer machine or different hardware configuration would have yielded better results, but it's still enough of a pain to be worth noting.

    The internet browser shares the same kinds of ups-and-downs as the included software. Pulling up the browser immediately gives the user a whole slew of choices to click on, all of them educational and completely free. The problem comes when trying to go to sites outside of those listed in the homepage. The safety filter is far too strict and disallows no-brainer sites like cartoonnetwork.com. It's so strict, in-fact, it makes web browsing useless for homework research or playtime for kids older than toddler age.

    Despite some uneven ideas about its target audience (late grade school games v. early grade school web filters) and a few minor quality control issues, Wizard's KidSafe is a giant leap in an important and overlooked niche in the OS market. Sadly, the man behind it has apparently taken down the KidSafe homepage and stopped development of future versions. I can only hope someone else takes up the cause and releases something similar. It would truly be a tragedy if this notion of a Kid-Safe OS grows old alongside its final release.



    Name:
    Email:
    Comment:

    COMMENTS:

    Name: Khalysto
    Email: kfprod@gmail.com
    Comment Made Thu 11th Jan,2007 06:40 am:
    Good explanation of live CDs there champ, but use more invisible tables to format the text better. You should also change the WarmOtor logo so it occupies the top frame (with navigation controls) & make the left nav pane scrollable so I can see it all the way down here.
    -----
    Name: Khalysto
    Email: kfprod@gmail.com
    Comment Made Thu 11th Jan,2007 06:41 am:
    The BACK button after submitting feedback shouldn't take you back to your feedback frame. It can confuse and make people think the feedback didn't make it
    -----
    Name: warmotor
    Email: anonymous
    Comment Made Thu 11th Jan,2007 04:07 pm:
    Clicking on the WM logo will take you back to the main page. I'm not using frames, I don't like frames - so no the left bar will never be scrollable. No offense but I think frames are teh cheez.

    I hear what you're saying about the return from the feedback program. I was thinking the same thing, I'll see if I cant do something about it in the future. You don't like the formatting of the the text? I could left justify to square it off so it looks more organic, but tables won't work because I'm allowing the user to specify font size and I can't garantee it'll come together in a cohesive fasion. Besides, thats the beauty of HTML is the flexibility to let the user's browser do the thinking.
    -----

    Thanks for coming here instead of looking at pornography.