News :: Debian Live Initiative

I think debian is maybe feeling a little left behind as livecd distros have boomed in popularity. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

I remember recently reading an article about the boom of Slackware based livecd's. The linux-live scripts have made it VERY easy to create your own custom livecd from a hd install of some distros. I used the scripts on an install of STX and in a few minutes I had a livecd of my installation.

Knoppix is still king IMHO.

I find most other small liveCD distros don't have the hardware detection that Knoppix provides. Most do not pass my testing on the few machines that I have. It is not difficult to make a liveCD for your computer, but try making one that works on most computers. Knoppix based hardware detection works well, and that is why we are based on it and keep the KNOPPIX image name thereby maintaining the recognition that Klaus Knopper so rightly deserves.

amen

For the life of me I cannot understand why it has taken Debian so long to wake up to the need for a single cd desktop system installer. It's as if they had to be hit over the head with the rapid growth of Ubuntu. And for years, fedora et al have had anaconda (multicd but very easy). But in Debian I'm still inserting this cd and that cd, pulling out the one you first thought of etc. (And netinstall is not much good without a good internet connection).

I think the root of the "problem" (I don't know if it's fair to call it a problem) is that Debian is as much a philosophical and academic exercise as it is an OS (just think of their insistence on the term GNU/Linux). Their focus is on creating or distributing true open-source software, and cannot compromise those prinicples for the sake of usability or compatibility. for example, source code must be available and unencumbered by any kind of patents or non-FSF copyrights.

Debian is great as a reference standard for Linux. If I were to build Linux from source, I'd work with Debian. For really solid, well-tested, and reviewable code, I'll use Debain. This is fine on a server that presents limited, standard interfaces; but for a "daily driver" on my PC, I'll use DSL.

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