Linux live distros
Knoppix is undoubtedly the best known of the live Linux distributions, but it’s not the solution to all your computing woes. Its use as a tech-support tool can easily be stymied by the fact that it takes over your CD/DVD drive, making it hard to take decent-sized back-ups without a second unit or a huge USB memory stick. The bundled software is comprehensive, but perhaps not what you want to use. For starters, you may want to use KDE rather than GNOME as your desktop, or run Firefox rather than Konqueror. Luckily, the very nature of Linux means that while Knoppix is the live distribution that people talk about the most, there are many others out there that do everything from turning Knoppix into Gnoppix to targeting specific groups of users.
Linux fun and games
One of the most talked about in recent months is Games Knoppix – no prizes for guessing who it’s aimed at. Rather than having to worry about hardware configuration and tracking down something to play on a whim, you simply drop the disc into your drive, reboot, and have a whole arcade at your fingertips. True, the games on offer won’t be keeping Sony and Nintendo awake for long – we’re talking the likes of FreeCiv and GNUChess, with some space for demos of more adventurous fare like Marble Blast Gold – but it’s a basic truth of the computer industry that games are invariably the most bothersome products to get up and running. You can download the ISO here . Alternatively, other dedicated gaming distros are available, notably Gentoo Games , which provides titles like America’s Army and the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo at the push of a button. Specifically, a reset button.
The key of the problem
Sticking with Knoppix for the time being, we can easily find a way around its most crippling problem: taking over your CD drive. Knoppix may run from memory, but it requires the disc to be on hand at all times, and this can cause incredible difficulty if you’re using it as an emergency updater. The average memory key isn’t that large (about 256MB) making it less than ideal for backing up important information on a crashed drive.
This time, we need to get our own hands dirty. First, we need to have a computer that can boot from USB in the first place. For most modern machines, this shouldn’t be a problem. Next, we need a Linux distribution that can strip down enough to fit onto a key. Damn Small Linux is the obvious choice.
Hollywood in motion
We haven’t mentioned MoviX for a while now, but it’s an excellent tool to keep on hand whether you use Linux or not. Put simply, a MoviX disc turns any computer into a media-playing machine. You boot from the CD, replace it with a DVD or other content you want to enjoy, and it plays automatically. Commercial DVDs are unsupported due to licensing tangles over the CSS encryption system, but home movies or unencrypted discs are fair game. A spin-off of the MoviX project, eMovix (accessed from the same URL) simplifies the process even more, making it possible to drop the disc in and simply auto-play your movies straight from it – the equivalent of slipping it into a DVD player, but without the need for any configuration or dedicated player software.
Playing back history
ByzantineOS is another live distro with an entertainment flavour to it. Unlike most, it moves away from the KDE/GNOME standard in favour of Metacity, with Mozilla as the core component. You can listen to music via XMMS, chat with GAIM and, of course, watch movies on MPlayer. What makes it slightly more interesting is that you can step in and customise everything extremely easily, with full instructions on how to punch in your favourite Mozilla bookmarks, proxy servers, and other relevant information that you need to get started immediately.
Attack of the hackers
Not all live distributions are geared towards day-to-day use. Some, such as Sentry Firewall , serve one very specific purpose – in this case, protecting your network by simply slipping the disc into the drive. A floppy disk handles any custom settings, but the system is secure from the off.
On the other side of the hacking fence, Polish magazine Hakin9 offers a unique spin on cover discs with its own bootable distro. Obviously, it’s a magazine for those who need to know this information – security specialists and administrators rather than black-hats – but the LiveCD will equip you with everything you need to fully understand the security threats in front of you. And, if you decide to use it for anything else, remember, you didn’t hear about it from us …
Abort, retry, fire!
Of course, what starts can also stop. FIRE, which stands for Forensic and Incident Response Environment, is a dedicated repair distro. Once downloaded from here , you’ll find that the tools on offer are rather more specific to security than other live distributions, with tools like Nessus, whisker and nmap rather than games and replacement text editors. In addition to running a virus scan on your system and replacing binaries with trusted versions, it boasts a graphical option, the ability to run via serial cable if necessary, and the ability to test your system to see if you’re likely to be using it again in the near future.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world
It’s easy to forget that not everybody wants an English Linux distribution out of the box. Arabbix is a Live CD dedicated to the Arabic-speaking world. It’s not simply a matter of translating the words themselves – Arabbix has to have a reworked interface, with features like spell-checking and simple text entry all working exactly as they should. Dealing with the keyboard mapping is a project in itself. By doing it all as a live distro, the team can simply hand out a disc knowing that there aren’t going to be any computing culture clashes when getting OpenOffice.org up and running.
These are just a few of the many live distributions available for the taking, all free, and all produced because somebody, somewhere couldn’t find one that served their needs. It’s possible to create your own without requiring too much technical knowledge, simply by cutting up and editing distros like Knoppix. Full instructions and sample projects, just like our USB-based bootable disc, can be found all over the Internet, complete with advice on how to get programs like Mozilla Firefox running without the benefit of a hard drive installed.
You may not think it, but Windows XP can be turned into a bootable disc as well.
Turning XP into a bootable disc is a fairly involved process. Essentially, you install it as normal before copying it back to the disc along with the standard Windows XP disk image to make sure it’s bootable. In the process, you can also ‘slipstream’ the Service Packs onto the disc, saving you having to download SP1 or SP2 at a later date. You’ll find the instructions here , or by following the steps in Bart’s Preinstalled Environment here . Be careful when doing this – to say that Microsoft won’t support you if anything goes wrong is the understatement of the century.
In addition to the basic program, you’ll find a huge collection of plug-ins for BartPE, including a Ramdisk, boot fixers and the Remote Desktop Client. Some of the set are unusable unless you go out and buy a separate program, such as Disk Commander or Norton Ghost, while others require a few quick downloads from the Internet: Ad-Aware, IrfanView, PuTTY and the McAfee AVERT Stinger utility.
Why would you want to use this in the first place? Simple. As powerful as Knoppix is, if you’re not a Linux user, chances are, you don’t really know what the programs it offers actually do. In that situation, you don’t want to be fumbling around trying to find the one switch that will give you unrestricted access to your own hard drive. If you’re using a copy of Windows that you spend all day with, you have home field advantage – doubly so, because there’s no way to accidentally wipe out the settings on a burned disc.