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LiveDistro or Live CD is a generic term for an operating system distribution that is executed upon boot, without installation on a hard drive. Typically, it is stored on bootable media such as a CD-ROM (Live CD), DVD (Live DVD), Floppy (Live floppy), USB flash drive (Live USB), among others. Download high resolution version (1024x768, 196 KB) Screenshot of Gnoppix 0. ...
Download high resolution version (1024x768, 196 KB) Screenshot of Gnoppix 0. ...
Gnoppix is an Ubuntu-based LiveCD. It is a complete Linux distribution running on a CD or DVD drive without using a hard drive. ...
Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME computer desktop. ...
This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ...
Gaim is a popular multi-platform instant messaging client that supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols. ...
The title of this article should be freenode. ...
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat or synchronous conferencing. ...
// An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ...
A Linux distribution, often simply distribution or distro, is a member of the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems comprising the Linux kernel, the non-kernel parts of the GNU operating system, and assorted other software. ...
Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
In computing, booting (booting up) is a bootstrapping process that starts operating systems when the user turns on a computer system. ...
The CD-ROM (an abbreviation for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (ROM)) is a non-volatile optical data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM drive. ...
DVD (Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that comprises a circular piece of thin, flexible (hence floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic wallet. ...
A USB flash drive, shown with a 24 mm U.S. quarter coin for scale. ...
A live USB is a USB flash drive containing a full operating system which can be booted from. ...
The term "live" derives from the fact that these distributions are a complete, runnable, i.e. "live" instance of the operating system residing on the distribution media, rather than the typical case of a collection of packages that must first be installed on the target machine prior to using the OS.
A LiveDistro does not alter the current operating system or files unless the user specifically requests it. The system returns to its previous state when the LiveDistro is ejected and the computer is rebooted. It does this by placing the files that typically would be stored on a hard drive into temporary memory, such as a ram disk. In fact, a hard drive is not needed at all. However, this does cut down on the RAM available to applications, reducing performance somewhat. At least 256 MB of RAM is recommended, but some LiveDistros do fine with less. ReBoot was a Canadian CGI animated series that was produced by Mainframe Entertainment, created by Gavin Blair, Ian Pearson, Phil Mitchell and John Grace, with the striking visuals created by Brendan McCarthy after an initial attempt by Ian Gibson. ...
A RAM-Disk, Ramdisk or Ramdrive is a virtual solid state disk that uses a segment of active computer memory, RAM, as secondary storage, a role typically filled by hard drives. ...
Look up RAM, Ram, ram in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
It is often said LiveDistros are a good way to demo or preview an operating system without having to install it to a hard drive.
Common traits
Some LiveDistros come with an installation utility launchable from a desktop icon that can optionally install the system on a hard drive or USB keydrive. Most LiveDistros can access the information on internal and/or external hard drives, diskettes and USB Flash drives. Generally LiveDistros are booted from read-only media, requiring either copying to rewriteable media (i.e. a hard drive) or complete remastering to install additional software; however, there are exceptions such as the Slackware ZipSlack distribution, which is designed to run off a Zip disk. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard to interface devices. ...
A USB keydrive, shown with a US quarter coin for scale. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that comprises a circular piece of thin, flexible (hence floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic wallet. ...
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard to interface devices. ...
A USB flash drive. ...
Remastering (the term is taken from the audio production process) is the process of customizing a software distribution for personal or off-label usage. ...
Slackware was one of the earliest Linux distributions, and is the oldest, and most UNIX-like, distribution still being maintained[1]. It was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. ...
Later (USB, left) and earlier (parallel, right) Zip drives (media in foreground). ...
Most LiveDistros are based on Linux, but there are also LiveDistros based on other operating systems, such as Mac OS, Mac OS X, Solaris, BeOS, ReactOS, FreeBSD, Minix, NetBSD, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows. The first OS to support LiveDistro operations as they now exist appears to have been the AmigaOS, which could be booted from CD on an Amiga CDTV in 1990. Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ...
This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
Mac OS X (official IPA pronunciation: ) is a line of proprietary, graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ...
Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ...
BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. ...
ReactOS is a project to develop an operating system that is binary-compatible with application software and device drivers for Microsoft Windows NT version 5. ...
FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4. ...
MINIX is a free/open source, Unix-like operating system (OS) based on a microkernel architecture. ...
NetBSD is a freely redistributable, open source version of the Unix-like BSD computer operating system. ...
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, primarily used as a research vehicle. ...
Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...
Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ...
AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. ...
A CDTV with accessories The CDTV was the first computer to come with a CD ROM drive as standard. ...
The syslinux utility is used to boot Linux based LiveDistros as well as Linux floppies. On a PC, a bootable CD generally conforms to the El Torito specification which treats a special file on the disc (possibly hidden) as a floppy diskette image. Many Linux based LiveDistros use a compressed filesystem image, often with the cloop compressed loopback driver, or squashfs compressed filesystem, generally doubling effective storage capacity, although slowing application start up. The resulting environment can be quite rich: typical Knoppix systems include around 1,200 separate software packages. The SYSLINUX Project covers a suite of lightweight bootloaders, for starting up computers in the Linux operating system. ...
The Altair 8800 was among the first microcomputers to be affordable by an individual, although it initially lacked peripherals and memory. ...
The El Torito Bootable CD Specification is an extension to the ISO 9660 CD-ROM specification. ...
The compressed loopback device or cloop is a module for the Linux kernel. ...
Squashfs (.sfs) is a free (GPL) compressed read-only file system for the Linux operating system. ...
Knoppix, also spelled as KNOPPIX, is a computer operating system which can be used as a live CD. It is a Debian based Linux distribution, developed by Linux consultant Klaus Knopper. ...
LiveDistros have a reputation for supporting advanced auto-configuration and plug-and-play functionality. This is necessary so as to avoid requiring the user to configure the system each time it boots, and to make them easily usable by those who are new to the operating system. Auto-configuration is the automatic configuration of devices without manual intervention, without any need for software configuration programs or jumpers. ...
Plug and Play is a term used in the computer field to describe a computers ability to have new devices, normally peripherals, added to it without having to restart the computer. ...
History Originally, many disk-based microcomputer operating systems (including CP/M, early versions of MS-DOS, and Apple DOS) were effectively LiveDistros, since most (at least those that were not ROM-based like the CBM KERNAL) were distributed on floppy disk and there was generally no hard disk to transfer them to; without a hard drive, it was common practice to create a boot disk, often customized to run a specific application. The modern phenomenon of the LiveDistro began with the wide distribution of CD-ROM drives on computers already equipped with hard drives, allowing users to run an operating system not already installed without altering the installed configuration on the hard drive. CP/M was an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. ...
Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...
Beneath Apple DOS was a popular guide to Apple DOS. Apple DOS refers to operating systems for the Apple II series of microcomputers from 1978 through early 1983. ...
Commodore, the commonly used name for Commodore International, was an American electronics company based in West Chester, Pennsylvania which was a vital player in the home/personal computer field in the 1980s. ...
The KERNAL is Commodores name for the ROM-resident operating system core in its 8-bit home computers; from the original PET of 1977, via the extended, but strongly related, versions used in its successors; the VIC-20, C64, Plus/4, C16, and C128. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. ...
Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ...
A boot disk is a removable media, normally read-only, that can boot an operating system or utility. ...
The CD-ROM (an abbreviation for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (ROM)) is a non-volatile optical data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM drive. ...
The first GNU/Linux-based LiveCD was Yggdrasil Linux (went out of production in 1995), though in practice it did not function well due to the low throughput of then-current CD-ROM drives. The first well-known LiveCD was the Debian-derived Knoppix (released in 2003), which has found wide usage as both a rescue disk system and as a primary distribution in its own right. Since 2003, the popularity of LiveCDs has increased substantially, partly due to Linux Live scripts which made it very easy to build customized live systems. GNU (pronounced ) is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. ...
Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system. ...
Yggdrasil Linux was an early Linux distribution (distro) developed by Yggdrasil, a company founded by Adam Richter. ...
Year 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full 1995 Gregorian calendar). ...
Debian is a project based around the development of a free, complete operating system through the collaboration of volunteers from around the world. ...
Knoppix, also spelled as KNOPPIX, is a computer operating system which can be used as a live CD. It is a Debian based Linux distribution, developed by Linux consultant Klaus Knopper. ...
2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted or inaccessible primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. ...
Technique
File system A Read-only file system, such as on a CD-ROM has the drawback of being unable to save any current working data. For this reason, a read-only file system is often merged with a temporary writable file system in the form of a ramdisk. Often the default Linux directories "/home" (containing users' personal files and configuration files) and "/var" (containing variable data) are kept in ramdisk, because the system updates them frequently. Read-only memory (usually known by its acronym, ROM) is a class of storage media used in computers and other electronic devices. ...
In computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them. ...
A ramdisk is a filesystem that resides in volatile, random access memory. ...
In computing, a directory, catalog or folder,[1] is an entity in a file system which contains a group of files and/or other directories. ...
In computing, configuration files, or config files, are used to configure the initial settings for some computer programs. ...
In Computer Science, data is often distinguished from code, though both are represented in modern computers as binary strings. ...
In modern LiveDistros, a read-only file system is merged with ramdisk using transparent techniques such as UnionFS or AuFS. In MS-DOS systems, a DOS utility, ramdrive.sys, could be loaded at boot for this purpose. In human-computer interaction, computer transparency is an aspect of user friendliness which prevents the user from worrying about technical details (like installation, updating, downloading or device drivers). ...
UnionFS is a Linux filesystem service which implements a union mount for Linux file systems. ...
Hardware detection LiveDistros have to be able to detect a wide variety of hardware (including network cards, graphic cards etc.). This is easily achieved nowadays by udev or hotplug, which is a common part of all distributions based on Linux kernel 2.6. A network card, network adapter or NIC (network interface controller) is a piece of computer hardware designed to allow computers to communicate over a computer network. ...
A GeForce 4 4200-based graphics card A graphics card or video card is a component of a computer which is designed to convert a logical representation of an image stored in memory to a signal that can be used as input for a display medium, most often a monitor...
udev is the device manager for the Linux 2. ...
The Linux kernel is a Unix-like operating system kernel. ...
Emulation There are number of emulators (the article virtual machine also contains a list of them) on the market that can be used to try a LiveDistro without the need to install it on a medium or burn it to a CD or boot it on the computer. The most widely supported i386 emulator is VMware. Others include QEMU and its accelerator Kqemu, PearPC and Bochs which can all also emulate the x86 and/or PowerPC platforms, although due to their software emulation methods, they are slower than the hardware alternatives. VirtualBox is only a virtualization box, not an emulator which is far speedier than emulation and a good alternative. Both but VMware are free software under GPL license. Another emulator that has turned from commercial to freeware is Microsoft Virtual PC. DosBox emulates the familiar command line interface of DOS. An emulator duplicates (provide an emulation of) the functions of one system with a different system, so that the second system behaves like (and appears to be) the first system. ...
In computer science, a virtual machine is software that creates a virtualized environment between the computer platform and its operating system, so that the end user can operate software on an abstract machine. ...
A CD-R (Compact Disc-Recordable) is a thin (1. ...
In computing, booting (booting up) is a bootstrapping process that starts operating systems when the user turns on a computer system. ...
VMware Inc. ...
It has been suggested that Qemu-Launcher be merged into this article or section. ...
It has been suggested that Qemu-Launcher be merged into this article or section. ...
PearPC on Ubuntu PearPC logo PearPC is an architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including Mac OS X, Darwin and Linux. ...
Bochs for Windows displaying HAL91 (Linux) Bochs is a portable open source x86 and AMD64 PCs emulator mostly written in C++ and distributed under GNU Lesser General Public License. ...
PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. ...
VirtualBox by InnoTek is an x86 virtualizer for Windows and Linux 32-bit hosts supporting Windows, Linux 2. ...
The GNU logo For other uses of GPL, see GPL (disambiguation). ...
Virtual PC is an emulation suite for Apple Mac OS X, and a virtualization suite for Microsoft Windows operating systems. ...
See also A live USB is a USB flash drive containing a full operating system which can be booted from. ...
This is a large list of LiveDistros. ...
LiveDistro is a generic term for an operating system distribution that is executed upon boot, without installation on a hard drive. ...
It has been suggested that Qemu-Launcher be merged into this article or section. ...
In computing, optical disc authoring, including CD authoring and DVD authoring, known often as burning, is the process of recording source material—video, audio or other data—onto an optical disc (compact disc or DVD). ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
External links - Linux Live scripts
- Bootable CDROM HowTo
- LiveDistro.org:
- Comprehensive collection of build tools,
- remaster howtos
- release announcements,
- aggregated news and
- long lists of LiveDistros
- How to run a LiveCD without rebooting.
- The LiveCD List links & information on over 300 LiveCDs
- Long list of LiveCDs at the Knoppix Wiki
- The Debian Wiki lists some Debian-based live-CDs, and tips on how to make your own customized live-CD.
- The magic of live CDs Article published on Free Software Magazine about LiveDistros
- LiveCD News
- LiveCD Build Scripts
- LiveDistro Network Penetration OSs
- Pondering LiveCDs - A BSD perspective on the concept of LiveCDs
- Jon's List of Live Bootable CDs
- Darknet 10 Best Security Live CD Distros for pen-test, forensics, and recovery
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