Distributions

Red Hat Based Live CDs

[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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Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for August 26, 2003 is out, with another look at LinEx, software patents in Europe, the next Debian release, Debian Birthday Party Aftermath, and much more.

Core PAM packages have been uploaded to unstable. This upload addresses the longstanding issue of central management of PAM authentication/password services in Debian. These packages are in need of further testing so they can be included in the Sarge release.

A new mailing list has been created to help track release critical bugs, and hopefully squash them more quickly.

DebianPlanet has updated instructions for backporting Gnome 2.2 on a Woody system.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 34

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of August 25, 2003 is out. This edition looks at new experimental LiveCDs and stages released for the AMD64 platform; Gentoo Forums reach several new milestones; and more.

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Mandrake Linux

LinuxQuestions.org has announced a new Mandrake Linux forum.

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Slackware Linux

This week at Slackware Linux there has been some general cleanup to the slackware-current branch, as seen in the slackware-current changelog.

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Onebase Linux

Onebase Linux (OL) is an independent meta source distribution created in July 2003. It is powerful, transparent and free. The installation, packages and configuration are managed by an in-house integrating technique called Onebase Linux Management (OLM). Even though Onebase Linux is a source distribution, it is designed to be easy for novice Linux users and even for fresh Windows converts. The first public release of Onebase Linux, version 1.0 beta, was announced July 24, 2003.

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Echelon Linux

Echelon Linux is a Knoppix based Linux distribution designed to monitor and to manage your network. It features IDS (intrusion detection system), vulnerability scanning, and services monitoring. Echelon Linux configuration can be defined via a Web interface. Initial version 0.1 was released August 26, 2003.

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2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux

Mungkie Associates has released 2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux version 1.2.0 (source code) with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: https and SSL have been implemented in less than 110Kb. Some cookie bugs have been fixed. Other things have been updated to recent versions. The stuff algorithms have been updated. The changelogs have been erased."

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Rock Linux

Rock Linux has released v2.0.0-camp with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Many setup tool (STONE) improvements, various new and updated packages including JPEG 2000 support, preliminary x86-64 and ARM support, SPARC64 build fixes, and IBM rs6k related adaptations, as well as various build script cleanups and fixes, including cluster build improvements."

dRock v2.0.0-camp is also available, with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This released is based on ROCK Linux 2.0.0-camp (the release done during the Chaos Communication Camp in Berlin/Old Europe). It includes major feature enhancements and bugfixes, and support for architectures like SPARC and PowerPC/rs6k."

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Slackware Live CD

Slackware Live CD has released v2.9.0.21 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: This release now includes the 2.4.21 kernel, KDE 3.1.3, mplayer 0.91, kopete 0.71, and k3b 0.9. initrd now only uses 13 MB for the RAM disk, Apache, PHP, MySQL, mutt, procmail, and APM are started automatically, and dbdiff (configsave) was rewritten for improved speed."

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stresslinux

stresslinux has released v0.2.4 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: smartmontools, lshw, x86info, and hddtemp have been upgraded to new versions, and the mk_bootstic package is now available for creation of bootable memory sticks or usb-floppy (LS120 or ZIP)."

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Operating the ULB: SLES 8 on the Ultimate Linux Box (Linux Journal)

The Linux Journal "Ultimate Linux Box" series continues with this review of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. "The installation manual goes so far as to describe how to set up a VNC client on Windows so you can install the SuSE system from a remote console in a heterogenous environment. The administration manual is detailed similarly. Both manuals have plenty of screenshots, footnotes and everything else a serious 500-server wrangler could want. Perhaps this might be a bit overwhelming for a newbie, but SLES 8 is no newbie's distribution."

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The Penguin in the Apple (Linux Journal)

This Linux Journal article covers the process of installing Gentoo Linux on a PowerBook. "I successfully installed Gentoo Linux on the PowerBook, and the procedure was quite straightforward even if there are some issues to keep in mind. The tested machine is a Titanium PowerBook with a PowerPC G4 800MHz processor, 512MB of memory, 40GB of hard disk space, 15" screen (1280x854 pixels), Radeon Mobility 9000 video card, Gigabit Ethernet and wireless Airport card integrated. You can follow the PPC general instructions on the Gentoo site to install Gentoo Linux. For the rest of this article, I focus only on Titanium-specific configurations."

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0: Beta Test Drive (eWeek)

eWeek takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Beta (Taroon) for a test drive. "Taroon ships with the XFree86 4.3 graphics subsystem, as well as with GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) 2.2 and KDE (K Desktop Environment) 3.1.2. It also the OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 office productivity suite, Ximian Evolution 1.4.3 mail client and Mozilla 1.4 Web browser."

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