“GNU/Linux live CDs are increasingly playing an important role in the free software community. They serve as advocacy tools, they make it possible for newbies to try out software without having to install anything and they make fantastic rescue disks. While all the best known live CDs are GNU/Linux variants, there are also several *BSD live CDs out there. I decided to give them a test run.”
I consider Live CD’s or DVD’s an excellent choise to show someone a new OS. For example, in the other day i wanted to show to a friend of mine the Kubuntu distro, but i currently have Windows XP installed on my system and i didn’t want to install it on VMWare, so i simply downloaded a Live Kubuntu CD an run it on my Athlon 64.
It’s a great way to try software and should be massivly suported by all OS manufactors. Even microsoft should have it.
I enjoy the writing as it does bring up some neat livecd’s made with *BSD bases, but the author was a bit unclear as to what type of problems they had booting were. One of the CD’s apparently just locked up on boot, so that was probably some form of a hardware kernel panic, but otherwise it’s unclear as to exactly what went wrong. There may have been boot-time arguments to resolve certain issues. I’m not saying I’m 100% positive that this was the case, but it just didn’t seem to clear as to what those issues were.
Either way, the writing is nice and it shows the people the potential power behind BSD type systems.
But nice to see the options side by side. I’d like to see more distro reviews like that. Any bias the reviewer might have towards a particular system will be controlled that way, since you can’t praise 5 different systems into the heavens without sounding suspicious.
…reviews were too short. But it was nice to see the comparison. NetBSD is my favorite. In fact I am downloading the CD even as we speak. I miss having a computer that runs NetBSD (or BeOS for that matter).
I don’t think the NetBSD crew has ironed out the Intel Mac bootstrap yet, but I figure I can give it a shot.