Red Hat Based Live CDs [LWN.net]

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

Bootable live Linux CDs have been around for several years, but it wasn't until the appearance of Debian-based Knoppix with its excellent hardware auto-detection and superior on-the-fly decompression that the concept really took off. The original idea was quickly expanded and many specialist and customized derivatives of Knoppix were born in the months after the first public release of the original Knoppix live CD. Probably the best place to find out about these projects is the knoppix.net community web site and its Knoppix Customizations page, which now lists no fewer than 56 live CDs, all based on Knoppix.

But what about those users who are more familiar with Red Hat Linux and its configuration tools? With the enormous diversity of the Linux ecosystem, it would be surprising if there were no Red Hat-based live CDs, and indeed, a search around the Internet reveals several interesting projects. Some of them are excellent, quality products which would stand proud in comparison with Knoppix. Let's take a brief tour of these projects, which include ADIOS Linux Boot CD, Cool Linux CD, RPM Live Linux CD and The SuperRescue CD.

ADIOS Linux Boot CD dc.qut.edu.au/adios is an impressive project by the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. The boot CD is essentially a modified Red Hat Linux 8.0 with kernel 2.4.19 and GNOME, KDE and IceWM desktop environments, but the CD also includes some interesting applications to compliment the original distribution. Some of the more noteworthy ones are:

LIDS, a kernel patch and administration tool to enhance the Linux kernel security;
squashfs, a highly compressed read-only filesystem for Linux using zlib compression to compress files, inodes and directories;
IPsec (short for IP security), a set of protocols developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to support secure exchange of packets at the IP layer;
User Mode Linux, a safe and secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes inside a virtual machine.

ADIOS is capable of auto-detecting most hardware and its web site has extensive documentation with further information and links to specialist tools included on the CD. The latest version is 1.32 and the 692MB CD can downloaded from the distribution's download page.

Cool Linux CD emergencycd2.sourceforge.net is a "cool" hobby project by Andrei Velikoredchanin, a system administrator in a small town in central Russia. It all started in June 2002 as an after-hour Linux experiment using the company's computers (since Andrei couldn't afford to buy his own) and developed into a product called "Emergency CD", followed by Cool Linux. An interesting aspect of Cool Linux is that it comes with useful software normally left out from other similar live CDs due to space limitations or other reasons, such as Blender, NVIDIA drivers and VMware (trial edition). Both KDE and GNOME are missing, but the much faster IceWM is more than capable of providing users with a clickable interface. The latest version of Cool Linux comes with a choice of two kernels - either a vanilla 2.4.22 or a patched 2.4.20-wolk (Working Overloaded Linux Kernel), a choice of common screen resolutions before boot, as well as automatic hardware detection and XFree86 configuration. Cool Linux is an expertly designed general purpose live distribution for workstations. The first release candidate of the upcoming version 2.3 was released earlier this week and the 598MB ISO image can be downloaded from its SourceForge project page.

RPM Live Linux CD nwst.de/livelinuxcd is a server oriented, Red Hat-based distribution with support for clustering. Developed by D. Westfall, the live distribution's primary purpose is to provide a quick and dirty Linux system without any graphical environment. The CD includes openMosix kernel 2.4.20-openmosix as well as OpenMosixTools, which together allow for building of "instant clusters". The latest version of RPM Live Linux CD is 1.0 beta (82MB), released two weeks ago, but the author also provides an extensive HOWTO for building custom live CDs for specialist purposes, such as rescue CDs, routers, intrusion detection systems, cluster nodes or dedicated servers.

The SuperRescue CD www.kernel.org/pub/dist/superrescue is one of the oldest live CD distributions and, as its name suggests, it is designed specifically for emergency situations. At two CDs of 560MB each it is also one of the largest. SuperRescue is developed by H. Peter Anvin, a well-known developer of many essential Linux utilities, such as SYSLINUX. The SuperRescue project does not have a proper web site, but some basic information is available on its Freshmeat project page and in this brief LinuxPlanet review, while technical support is provided via mailing lists. The latest version of SuperRescue is 2.1.2, which is based on Red Hat Linux 7.x.

There are other live CDs with RPM package management, although not necessarily based on Red Hat. The best known among them is SuSE Live-Eval which is mainly designed for testing and evaluation purposes of the full commercial edition of SuSE Linux prior to purchase, but it can of course serve as a useful rescue disk. Also worth noting is Virtual Linux, which is a Mandrake-based live CD and although the project is no longer in development, the last release can still be downloaded from its SourceForge project page. Japan's Linux MLD has also developed an RPM-based live Linux CD for the domestic market.

In summary, if familiarity with Red Hat Linux dictates your preference for Linux live CDs, then ADIOS, Cool Linux and RPM Live Linux CD are probably the best choices. Each of them is targeting a different segment of the market, but all of them are worthy of being added to your collection of Linux rescue and demo CDs.

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