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Announcements Operating Systems BSD

FreeBSD Based Live CDs 252

Posted by timothy from the peanut-butter-chocolate dept.
Newtonian_p writes "Now the BSD world has an answer to Knoppix. The FreeSBIE project have released a live FreeBSD based system on CD. There are also plans to develop a suite of programs to be used to create a personalized disk." If it offers a painless BSD install (the way Knoppix makes it easy to install Debian to a hard drive), this should be a popular project. Reader Cronopios links to a related effort called LiveBSD which "has heavily modified FreeSBIE's scripts to allow for apache mysql and many other programs to run."
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FreeBSD Based Live CDs More

FreeBSD Based Live CDs

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  • I'm there! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phrostie ( 121428 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:51AM (#8450789)
    i'd been meaning to give one of the BSDs and other try. maybe nows the time.

    good news.

  • FreeSBIE? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:53AM (#8450800)
    At least if I mess up the CD burning, I won't get a coaster!

  • Hopefully eventually (Score:5, Interesting)

    by beware1000 ( 678753 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:55AM (#8450815)
    I'd really like to see one of those Business card [lnx-bbc.org] size CD's in BSD form. The Linux ones have saved me more times than I can count.

  • Not much info available (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:55AM (#8450817) Homepage Journal

    Yeah, I RTFA, but it's pretty sparse. Can anyone involved explain a bit more how this works?

    I would think it would be similiar to the MandrakeMove(?) live linux CD we saw earlier this year, but bad things happen when I make assumptions. :)

  • OS Comparison (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DarkkOne ( 741046 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @07:55AM (#8450818) Homepage Journal
    This is good news for alot of people (like me.) I've just recently developed a fairly major interest in GNU/Linux, other alternatives, free software (as in speech) and the like. I've tried several GNU/Linux liveCDs, but am still in my "distro-decision" process, and having another alternative to try out will be very nice. Definitely a step in the right direction, the more OSes that you can "try before you buy" so to speak, the better, 'eh?

    • Re:OS Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MooCows ( 718367 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:08AM (#8450885)
      IMHO the best thing to do is grab a spare computer, download a bunch of interesting distro's (Linux, BSD, whatever you want), install them and use them for a day or two.

      You're bound to come across a distro suited for your needs.
      (server, router, desktop, multimedia system, whatever you want)

      Every Linux distro has it's upsides and it's downsides (both are mostly about whether it's something for you).

      As for the BSD's, I've never tried them, but afaik they're a bit more geared towards servers/security than Linux.

      It still comes down to personal choice :)

      • Re:OS Comparison (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DarkkOne ( 741046 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:25AM (#8450966) Homepage Journal
        Well, actually I'm looking for a variety of purposes. I need my internet gateway machine set up, a local network server for a variety of purposes, a development box (which in the end is probably going to end up running a Microsoft OS, because mainly I'm going to be working on a game project I've put aside for too long, and unfortunately if I ever want to sell it, the "mainstream" is still running MS. Though, with my development rate, GNU/Linux will be "mainstream" by then and MS will be suffering from bitrot. And yes, it'll probably include source either on-cd, or available online if I ever do finish and sell.)

        Anyway, back to the subject at hand, machines which will be running various OSes.
        A) Game Development platform.
        B) Internet Gateway
        C) Internal multipurpose server. (Print/File/Internal document/http hosting)
        D) Laptop.

        That last one's the fun one. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-NVR23, and I really want to move it to GNU/Linux, as it serves mainly as a word processor and web browser, so there's no excuse for it to have ANY non-free software, but I'm not familiar enough with GNU/Linux to necessarily be able to follow the directions I've found to get it working. Though I'm sure once I RTFM (or RTFD as the case may be) I'll get things worked out in the end.

        Anyway, suggestions for a few of those will be welcome, so long as you guys don't get into arguments about it. (Y'know, a few simple "Why this might work here" style comments are nice. Any posts that claim someone else is wrong, are most certainly not.)

        • Re:OS Comparison (Score:2, Interesting)

          by pnutjam ( 523990 )
          I would love to run Linux on my laptop, IBM Thinkpad 770z, but I find the wireless support in Linux to be sorely lacking.

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:3, Interesting)

            by DarkkOne ( 741046 )
            From what I've been able to tell, in my limited readings, the wireless support "out of box" at the moment seems to be lacking, but a little spot research and it seems often enough what you need can be found out there. If you've already installed and are discovering you're in trouble, and don't have an ethernet port to plug into, you may be in trouble, but since you're posting here, I imagine a little pre-planning is all you need.

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:3, Informative)

            by jdray ( 645332 )
            I recently went laptop shopping, and had decided that it was going to run Linux exclusively (no dual boot to Windows). I started by deciding which distro I wanted to use (SuSE was the end choice after much deliberation), then looking at their "supported hardware" page under notebooks. Lo and behold, SuSE has only certified IBM notebooks with their latest version, 9.0 (more brands to follow, I'm sure).

            Reading the certification results (example [suse.com]), I found that the internal WLAN card wasn't supported. Not

        • Re:OS Comparison (Score:5, Informative)

          by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @10:14AM (#8451919)

          ... a development box (which in the end is probably going to end up running a Microsoft OS, because mainly I'm going to be working on a game project I've put aside for too long, and unfortunately if I ever want to sell it, the "mainstream" is still running MS.

          No need to pollute your machine. I develop a computer simulation (it started as a thesis project), so it has almost all the same requirements a modern game would have: 3-D graphics, sound, GUI, etc. I use wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) which gets me pretty much every feature I need. The best part is tha I can use the gcc cross-compiler to build the win32 target .exe from my Linux box. I then have friends of mine test the final windows .exe (after I do some preliminary testing through WINE).

          I would assert that is better to develop the Win32 apps from linux than from win32. Especially since I don't have to worry about VS.NET flaking out on me, or the other crappy tools that are common on Windows.

        • Re:OS Comparison (Score:5, Informative)

          by Hel Toupee ( 738061 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @10:38AM (#8452147)
          Having used FreeBSD since 1999 or so for one reason or another, and having looked at several Linux distros, I'll throw in my 2cents.

          FreeBSD looks like UNIX (oversimplification, albeit) down-and-dirty. I ran X on it for awhile (enlightenment or fvwm95 on a 486DX/66) and will never again. It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there. It will run Linux-compatible binaries provided you have the right libraries.
          This is what I would use as the server because I am comfortable with it, and feel it is faster and more secure in this capacity. (I have little proof of the proceeding statement, but know there are thousands of benchmarks that prove me either right or wrong)

          Linux distros I've tried range from pretty and trendy (Mandrake, Knoppix), to Windows clones (Lin---s, Licoris), to down-and-dirty UNIX type (Slackware). Mandrake would be my choice for the laptop and the development box because I just like the way it feels.

          The FreeBSD live CD doesn't seem like anything more than an educational tool, because, IMHO, FreeBSD is supposed to be installed, customized, and left to what it does best, run server daemons. Check out linuxISO.org [linuxiso.org] if you haven't already. It is a quick resource for information about a TON of different distros.

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:4, Informative)

            by scrytch ( 9198 ) <chuck@myrealbox.com> on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @11:38AM (#8452743)
            FreeBSD looks like UNIX (oversimplification, albeit) down-and-dirty. I ran X on it for awhile (enlightenment or fvwm95 on a 486DX/66) and will never again. It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there.

            Yeah, clicking on "Desktop" in the installer, that really was hard.

            It will run Linux-compatible binaries provided you have the right libraries.

            I forgot to undertake the astonishingly difficult task of clicking "Linux Compatibility" in the install, so I had to resort to the incredibly complex "make install" command in any of the linux binaries port because I forgot that the linux base system had the incredibly cryptic name of "linux-base".

            You sir posited zero evidence for your assertions.

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:2, Informative)

            by mbadolato ( 105588 )
            It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there. It will run Linux-compatible binaries provided you have the right libraries.

            Oh come now... I've installed FreeBSD on a few machines ranging from a Dell pII 400 to a Frankenputer(tm) I built from parts lying around the house. I've never had any issues getting X running with Gnome, KDE, Windowmaker, or anything else. I choose the options right in the installer and it just works for me.

            From there the GUI runs just like it d

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:4, Informative)

            by UnassumingLocalGuy ( 660007 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @01:05PM (#8453683) Homepage Journal
            Maybe back in 1999 your rant holds true, but no more today. X and WindowMaker run happily on my little P133 laptop, and it took minimal effort to set up. Linux binary compatibility is a breeze to set up, I had UT2003 running (not on my laptop, of course) and fragging away.

            Next time you run the FreeBSD sysinstall, take a little more time and pay more attention.

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:5, Funny)

            by IronChef ( 164482 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @03:57PM (#8455834)
            It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there.

            yeah, "make install" just about killed me. and I can never remember that "startx" thing you have to do.

          • Re:OS Comparison (Score:3, Informative)

            by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
            It really is not set up for a GUI, and you will do a ton of work getting it there.

            I must respectfully disagree. I am using FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS at home and at work. I'ts fully "GUIified". KDE 3.2. MPlayer, Xmms, yada, yada, yada.

            While setting stuff up isn't automatically done for you before you even insert the install CD, it still isn't that difficult. Thanks to XFree86 (the true hero of the desktop), the days of having to manually compute modelines is ancient history. Run the command "XFree8
        • I recently moved all my machines (4, not that much) to Linux and here is the choices I finished with :

          B) Gateway : astaro.org
          Nice (very nice) standalone firewall with statefull packet inspection.

          You get a very secure firewall, with a free licence if under 10 protected ips.

          I'm using it as firewall, mail relay and DMZ control for my small webserver.
          updates are downloaded automatically and it's really, really stable.

          It also includes (for a fee) a good email antivirus.

          Nice solution, web based control, did

          • Addendum : (Score:3, Interesting)

            by da5idnetlimit.com ( 410908 )
            Just forgot the specs of the machines and the network, so you get an idea of what you need...

            All together I have 5 pcs and an Xbox on the network

            Internet Access is Xdsl 4Mbits and pppoe.

            Firewall is a PII 450 with 280 Mo ram. CPU usage under 2% average, so you can use a smaller machine if you want...

            The Webserver with E-smith is a PII350 with 370Mo ram, but it will run from a P200-128Mo and up.

            The fileserver is a Duron 1.3+256 Mo ram, 4+80Gigs on a raid card and a smallish 4Gig hdd for the system...more

      • Re:OS Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tiger99 ( 725715 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @09:01AM (#8451236)
        Hopefully give them a bit more than a day or two. Try configuring printers, firewall, scanner, compiling a kernel, downloading updates.....

        After a few months it will be a fairer comparison, if you can spare the time of course. You may find that most are good, none are perfect, and it depends which imperfections you want to tolerate. But, I'm sure you will find one that you like, and it will be of more use, in the long term, than the badly broken "competitive" products of the Convicted Monopolist, or the abominal violation of the GPL known as SCO Unix.

      • Re:OS Comparison (Score:3, Insightful)

        by joshmccormack ( 75838 )
        It's the "install them" part that takes up more time than would be ideal, and becomes the focus of too many reviews. Have you noticed most reviews of distors focus on installation and breeze over everything else? Seems a little crazy, doesn't it? I mean, even installing Gentoo or something, which can really become an experience to brag about, is generally not something you're doing every day.

        Installing the *BSDs has not had the ease that many of the Linux distros have had, so hopefully this will encourage

      • Re:OS Comparison (Score:2, Insightful)

        by 74nova ( 737399 )
        i agree completely(talk to my isp, they know) about trying lots of different distros. i also agree with another reply to yours that said give it a little longer than a couple days.

        i have one small thing to add about what youve said, however. not a correction, just an addition. something a new linux user need to think about is the speed of the machine used for testing versus that of the machine it will be used on. if you are blessed enough to have a spare machine that is up to standards, then by all m

    • Re:OS Comparison (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sweetshark ( 696449 )
      You might also take a look at distrowatch [distrowatch.org] to find candidates...

  • BSD isn't a hard install (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:01AM (#8450843)
    " If it offers a painless BSD install "

    I was shocked, yes shocked, at how easy OpenBSD was installed on my intel machine. The mac install was another kettle of fish but the intel install was the easiest install I've ever done. FreeBSD wasn't exactly a difficult install either. I don't remember NetBSD being hard come to think of it. Actually, has anybody found an intel BSD OS difficult to install?

    • Re:BSD isn't a hard install (Score:5, Informative)

      by clymere ( 605769 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:12AM (#8450898) Homepage
      Yes, it was a pain in the ass when I tried it on old hardware(p1). Of course i am a total newbie as far as the BSD's, I'm well aware that many install them on old hardware for use as routers. However, I can defintly say that I found BSD's to be more difficult then Linux on obsolete hardware. Maybe its easy once you know what you're doing.

      • "

        Maybe its easy once you know what you're doing."

        Well isn't that the case with all computers and software? I've installed all the Big Three BSDs, several iterations of the much feared Slack, Debian and countless other distros, and they've never posed any serious problems -- sure, driver/package issues and the like, but zero showstoppers. Why? I'm fairly computer literate, but nothing exceptional, I have no l33t *nix 1nst4ll sk1llz (maybe some experience).

        All I did was read, download and print down the nece

      • Re:BSD isn't a hard install (Score:5, Informative)

        by Punk Walrus ( 582794 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @09:21AM (#8451434) Journal
        I found OpenBSD so easy, it was virtually painless.

        1. Burn floppy
        2. Insert floppy into old hardware (in this case, a 486 DX4 100), reboot machine
        3. OpenBSD boots from floppy. Asked me if I want to Install, upgrade, or cancel. I chose (I)nstall
        4. Asked me which hard drive.
        5. Gave me fdisk like partition manager. Listed whole drive as c with one bit "a" FAT16 partition. I deleted "a," entered in the partitions I needed, with "b" being my swap by default. Did w,q to write and quit.
        6. Asked me to set up network interface, root password, etc...
        7. Asked me which install type, I set up ftp, I selected the mirror closest to me, selected the packages I wanted, and then waited for install to complete (20 min on cable modem).
        8. I took out the floppy, rebooted, and got a login prompt.
        9. Signed in as root, and heeded "afterboot" security warning.

        Then I installed bash with a simple add_pkg command, added non-root user, set up pf, found apache was installed and set up by default, changed forwarding to "1", slapped pfctl and apachectl to run, and wala! Working router/NAT/webserver in less than an hour.

      • Re:BSD isn't a hard install (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Hel Toupee ( 738061 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @11:12AM (#8452465)
        On obsolete hardware, I've found that FreeBSD, anyway, is much easier than Linux. FreeBSD is perfectly happy installing off of a floppy to any 486 or better with a network connection. Most Linux installs I've tried either don't have the option to go from floppy, or want a large amout of RAM (for the hardware in question) to install. My worst installation experience was Mandrake 9.1 on a P150 laptop with no cd drive and a non-standard cardbus controller that refuses to work with the yenta-socket driver. If BSD would have recognized the PCMCIA NIC, it would have been wham, bam, thank-you-ma'am. IIRC, even if Mandrake would have seen the NIC, I would still have to export the install CD's from a NFS server somewhere, because they don't have a central FTP site to use. As it was, I ended up pulling the hard drive out and loading the install stuff on it from another computer, then booting an install disk and using the low-mem configuration (I only have 48 meg) to install from the hard drive.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:19AM (#8450939)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Installing OpenBSD was a piece of cake, just some new users might be put off by the text only installer at first, but if you can get past that, you'll realize that it is so straight forward.

      One of the things I love about OpenBSD is that the documentation and man pages are so well done, having a look at the Installation Guide [openbsd.org] and the afterboot(8) [openbsd.org] man page, virtually anyone can have full fledged secure by default OS installed configured in a breeze.
    • Just stick the first floppy, partition, and your done. Easy as pie.

      Your probably talking about using it as a server and your right, if you follow the instructions any *nix isn't too difficult to get initially installed.

      My point is for the distro-of-the-week, dual-booting, desktop nix using, Slashdot majority who will probably need help once their beyond the basic initial install. For them the idea that any BSD is a "painless install" is a bit of a misnomer. The real test is getting X working at the prope
      • Debian based wih KDE as default manager...

        Installing Nvidia driver using a nice script from a guy called Kanotix (the name of his cluster distro, so google for it...)

        Printer conf using the tools given with Knoppix : 2 minutes

        Digital Camera/Scanner/usb, same 5 minutes as long as your camera works as a usb drive, much much harder otherwise...

        Palm : open a Midnight Commander session under root, go to /dev/ttyS0 (or S1 if you put your old palm Vx on com1) and change the rights so that everybody got read-wri
    • I tried to install OpenBSD (also FreeBSD and NetBSD) and was unable to get past
      the disklabel process. Now, there are some things about my setup that may have
      been making it hard, but in the same scenerio I was able to get other systems
      installed (e.g., Mandrake, BeOS), and I failed to get BSD working. One of the
      things I suspect may have been a problem is that I was trying to put it on my
      "spare" partition that I was keeping open at the time for fooling around with
      installing various things just for a few days

    • " If it offers a painless BSD install "

      I was shocked, yes shocked, at how easy OpenBSD was installed on my intel machine. The mac install was another kettle of fish but the intel install was the easiest install I've ever done. FreeBSD wasn't exactly a difficult install either. I don't remember NetBSD being hard come to think of it. Actually, has anybody found an intel BSD OS difficult to install?

      "Painless BSD install" means "I don't need to know what I'm doing."

      FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD have *

  • Available for purchase (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:03AM (#8450855)
    Just seen it at blcds.com for sale, if anyone's interested

  • Now? (Score:5, Informative)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:05AM (#8450868) Homepage
    Now the BSD world has an answer to Knoppix

    Err... This may be "Stuff that matters", but it shouldn't be "News for Nerds". FreeBSD has had live CDs since at least 2002.

    • Re:Now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by kent_eh ( 543303 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @09:51AM (#8451704)
      News? Not really.

      I have been using this particular FreeSBIE disk for a couple of months now. Using it to post this, as a matter of fact.

      I'm using it at work on a machine that normally runs XP and takes twice as long to boot to XP as it does to the live CD.

      For some reason the giant list of Live CDs [frozentech.com] doesn't seem to include the BSD variants.

      There are 8 different *BSD live CDs listed at LiveCDNews.com [livecdnews.com].

  • Another Live CD (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:07AM (#8450877)
    Another FreeBSD-based live CD is BSDeviant [unixpunx.org].

  • Plan 9 (Score:4, Funny)

    by IncarnadineConor ( 457458 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:10AM (#8450892)
    When is someone going to make one of these for plan 9? Leaving one of those in my drive would be a perfect way to make sure no one can screw with my computer.

  • Useful if money is tight (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jexx Dragon ( 733193 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:10AM (#8450893)
    I've been using Knoppix for some time now, as I have to use Windows on my computer and cannot afford another. I think that for those of us who like to get experiance with as many operating enviroments as possible, but can not set up systems for each this could be a very useful project. Though I suppose one could always just dual- or multi-boot.

  • LiveCD. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sentosus ( 751729 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:10AM (#8450896)
    I enjoy playing with LiveCDs, but I always find that we are not taking advantage of the writing ability of many CD drives.

    I want my configuration changes as well as any programs I install to be burned on the CD in either rewritable or writeable with limited space type setup.

    If I download a neat application and install it or save a word doc in my directory, I want it automatically cued up to be burned when I shutdown.

    Also, it would be nice to be able to go to a website and enter your hardware configuration and a customer version of the live cd be created on the server and be available for download with your drivers in ISO format.

    SP

    • Re:LiveCD. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mst76 ( 629405 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:45AM (#8451071)
      > I enjoy playing with LiveCDs, but I always find that we are not taking advantage of the writing ability of many CD drives.
      [...]
      > If I download a neat application and install it or save a word doc in my directory, I want it automatically cued up to be burned when I shutdown.

      First, most LiveCD systems are already packed to the brim, and don't allow you to unmount you're main CD during operation, so you'd need at least two drives. Second, there are two ways to add files to a cd-rw: multisession and packet writing. Multisession is widely supported, but not suitable for small files as there is a overhead of about 15MB for each new session. Packet writing requires the UDF filesystem. AFAIK, neither Linux nor FreeBSD have good UDF support in read-write mode, and I'm not sure if anyone is actively working on it.

      A much better bet would be a LiveCD in conjunction with USB flash memory for your personal files. If you want to install apps, the new version of the SLAX-Live CD supports ovlfs (Overlay Filesystem), which lets you insert files on a read-only root filesystem. For FreeBSD, unionfs might do the trick.

  • Wahoo! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Zebra_X ( 13249 )
    This will make an awsome Haxering platform. If you get run up on by the feds, just pull the battery out of your laptop.

  • DVD?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:17AM (#8450929) Homepage Journal
    With so many of us having dvd drives, I wonder why there isn't a dvd version?? You could fit so many more of the ports on there to be tried.

    • Re:DVD?? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Nurseman ( 161297 )
      With so many of us having dvd drives, I wonder why there isn't a dvd version??

      I asked this in a previous dicussion on Linux CD's and the answer has to do with how the OS reads DVD's. I don't recall the exact answer, but they are not "bootable". My DVD will boot a CD, but not a DVD. It may have to do with the way the bios reads the CD's
      • The Suse DVD booted just fine for me.
        Is this only an issue with BIOS's older than 2 years? It's worked on both a newer system, and an old HP we had sitting around.

  • I wonder why... (Score:5, Informative)

    by cesarcardoso ( 1139 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:21AM (#8450948) Homepage Journal
    ...the FreeBSD LiveCD [sourceforge.net] wasn't mentioned.

    It's the older FreeBSD LiveCD around, a project carried by the Brazilian FreeBSD User Group.

  • Its a shame linux doesnt work this well (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 8400_RPM ( 716968 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:22AM (#8450954)
    Its a shame that regular hard installed linux cant work as well as these live cds. To get debian to pick up my usb flash drive I had to recompile the kernel. To get redhat to see it I have to mount it every time. Yet with knoppix, I just plug it in and it works...

  • Live CD on Flash Drives??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 8400_RPM ( 716968 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:24AM (#8450960)
    I've seen 512mb flash drives and even 1gb flashdrives. Has anyone tried putting a live CD on one of these? I would think it would be blazing fast.

    • Re:Live CD on Flash Drives??? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bagels ( 676159 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:46AM (#8451077)
      Flash isn't blazing fast by any definition of the word fast, and it's a lot more expensive than CDs - for a 1GB flash drive you could go out and buy a copy of Windows or several copies of any Linux distro. Also remember that Flash has that whole re-writing problem - if the Flash inadvertently gets used for swap space or something, it'd die in no time. Lastly, not a lot of computers boot from USB without some CD to help them along (mine certainly wouldn't), so you'd probably need a CD anyway...
      • ..all the same there's few live distributions meant for such usage, though they're usually mini distributions under 100mb..

        advantages over cd's are obvious, it's small enough to keep on the keychain & etc..

  • Er... "Now?" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by little_fluffy_clouds ( 441841 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:24AM (#8450965)

    "Now the BSD world has an answer to Knoppix."

    Except we've had that answer for a while - here is the first NetBSD Live CD announcement from 20th June, 2002, by Jorg Braun:

    ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/1.5.2/README.i 386live [netbsd.org]

    Note this was the first version - a 1.6 based version was also released (with updated packages).

  • It's a great tool. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mrselfdestrukt ( 149193 ) <nollie_A7_firstcounsel_com> on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:32AM (#8450989) Homepage Journal
    "If it offers a painless BSD install (the way Knoppix makes it easy to install Debian to a hard drive), this should be a popular project."
    Dude, If you need Knoppix to be able to install Debian easily on your HD then you need help! If on the other hand you need a live Linux distro to use in emergencies or when a full installation is not viable/ available or required, then rather stick with your Knoppix.
    The same goes for this. It is great and a lot of BSD fans will be really happy about this, but I pity those that will use it to "easily" install FreeBSD on a HD. IMHO That's just sad...
    It is meant to be so much more and I think a lot of people don't understand the true functionality and usefullness of a live Linux distro or BSD. Anyway, nice!
    • Dude, If you need Knoppix to be able to install Debian easily on your HD then you need help!

      Yeah, so what if we do ned help? I hope you're teasing us for trying to learn this stuff. It puzzles me that it saddens you that not everybody is as elite as you. Some of us are bound to be newbies. Right?

      Personally, I've tried installing Debian a few times, and given up just as many times. Half of those, I couldn't even get my (plain vanilla) keyboard to work in the installer. And I freely admit it -- I do need
      • Personally, I've tried installing Debian a few times, and given up just as many times.

        I can install FreeBSD in my sleep, upside down and backwards looking in a mirror. But I've not once been able to endure the frustration level required to install Debian. So your experience has nothing to do with your newbieness.

        p.s. I'm not knocking Debian, but it's installer is not definitely not intuitive to the Debian outsider.

    • You are missing (one of) the points! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @01:14PM (#8453797)
      Dude, If you need Knoppix to be able to install Debian easily on your HD then you need help! If on the other hand you need a live Linux distro to use in emergencies or when a full installation is not viable/ available or required, then rather stick with your Knoppix.

      Wow, are you missing it! How many CDs are there in a Debian distro? In any distro? LiveCDs are 1 cd.

      LiveCDs are fantastic as emergency disks, but they are even better as installation disks. You get to SEE and USE the system before you install it. I have considered switching to Debian a couple of times (mainly because of apt-get), but it is a much bigger deal to backup, install, and try it out than to boot it and try it. Forget using a spare machine. Why would I want to spend hours when I could be up and running in 2 minutes?

      These things are fantastic, and will only improve over time. The only thing a distro offers that these don't is configurability during the install, where you pick and choose what you want to install. But that is a minor point IMO, and will be fixed if the need is really there.

      I have several different LiveCDs, and you know how many times I have used them for emergencies? None. I have performed several installs off of them though. Why would you deny one of the major benefits of these things?

  • Portage and deb-apt on FreeBSD (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Want Gentoo's portage and Dedian's deb-apt

    http://www.freshports.org/emulators/linux_base-d eb ian/

    http://www.freshports.org/emulators/linux_base-g en too-stage1/

    they worked fine, thank god I won't have to use linux. It's to risky with SCO attacking, my clients and I are much safer.

  • And the torrent... (Score:5, Informative)

    by IcePic ( 23761 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:41AM (#8451031) Homepage
    http://people.su.se/~jj/FreeSBIE-1.0-i386.iso.torr ent

  • Uh oh..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:46AM (#8451078)
    Live CD? BSD?

    The puns that can be made here...

  • Dead, LiveCD, make up your mind... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @09:35AM (#8451552) Homepage
    This should kick of a nice, long round of "BSD is Live" jokes.
  • Tis the question.

    On my cheap Athlon machine, with ECS K7S5A board, the following installers work fine:

    Win2k, WinXP, NetBSD 1.5.2, Gentoo 1.4, Slackware 8.0, Redhat 7.2, Redhat 8.0, and some Debian version

    The following installers fail by freezing after detecting hard drives:

    FreeBSD 4.4, FreeBSD 4.5, and FreeBSD 5.2.1

    • Yes, it did (Score:2, Interesting)

      by nonameisgood ( 633434 )
      I am running on the FreeBSIE live disk now, on a ECS K7S5A v.1 board.

      I did have to pop in a PS/2 mouse (having been using the same 3 button generic serial for years in this box), but it works great.

      I use Knoppix as a recovery disk when I screw up a config file or something else while tinkering and have found it to be very useful. I also supply copies to Win weenies when they ask about Linux.

  • Solaris LiveCD (Score:2, Informative)

    by GodBlessTexas ( 737029 )
    I can't really get excited about all these live CD's. A guy named Chris in Enron Broadband's Information Security Group created a Solaris LiveCD back in 2000 (before the term LiveCD either existed or was popular) that the InfoSec group used to run systems from CD. He even had one that was the absolute minimum of the OS to run IDS engines. I believe it was around 70MB total. After he hacked all that together from Solaris 2.6 and then 7, all the rest of this stuff just seems a bit anticlimactic. Don't ge
  • As far as Linux goes I'm a relative newb.
    I can edit configuration files, install packages from source, use SSH, and set up Apache/PHP and MySQL. That doesn't sound too bad at first, but I still don't have the ability to troubleshoot or utilize the OS to the degree that I can with Windows, simply due to familiarity.

    What I'm wondering is if customizing a distro is fairly straightforward, or a massive headache even for the experienced.

    I want to be able to boot up a LiveCD that has a collection of Care Sheets

  • ALLRIGHT!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by dos4who ( 564592 )
    Now I can finally make use of all those Knoppix FriSBEEs I've burned over the years...

    ~m

  • FreeBSD for newbies (Score:5, Informative)

    by xot ( 663131 ) <fragiledeathNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @11:34AM (#8452720) Journal
    I havent tried FreeSBIE so i would'nt know how easy or tough iut is to get a copy up or running.But what I do know is the getting a relatively standard box running FreeBSD is very ease.
    I would recommend all newbies who are trying out a unix OS for the first time to start with FreeBSD.There are a few reasons for this :

    1. The installer (sysinstall) is ver easy and self explanatory.
    2. FreeBSD gives you a lot of options in terms of how you want to install and from where.It can even pick up a the installation from a dos partition.(from c:)
    3. The documentation is amazing.You will love the handbook.All my questions about the installation were answered by the handbook itself, i had to look nowhere else.
    4. For any non-standard issues theres a very active FreeBSD mailing list.

    For all the above reasons,i think FreeSBIE should be even smoother than a normal FreeBSD install. Looking forward to givin it a spin, guess i dun have to try knoppix now ;-)

  • They've had one forever (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jtkooch ( 553641 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @11:50AM (#8452856)
    If you download the full CD set or purchase a book that comes with one, the 3rd CD is a live system disk.

  • My quick review (Score:5, Informative)

    by WD ( 96061 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @11:59AM (#8452925)
    Neat concept, but definately rough around the edges. (Especially compared to Knoppix)

    I am writing this from the Live CD using Firefox, so that at least says something. But here are some issues I ran in to: (Keep in mind I've never used FreeBSD before)

    1. The Live CD doesn't boot properly on my system. After churning away for a while, it finally gets to the boot splash screen so I can't see what's going on. Then after hitting a few keys I got to the console and it displayed an error:
    Mounting Root from cd9660:acd0
    Root Mount Failed: 5
    mountroot>

    Using a little trial and error I was able to get the boot process to continue by typing:
    cd9660:cd2
    It appears that the Live CD got confused along the way as to what CD drive is which. I have two IDE-attached and one SCSI-attached CD devices in my machine.

    2. I was presented with screens to select my KB Language and Layout. No biggie here, but just more interaction than Knoppix requires.

    3. At the end of the boot process, I was presented with a root console prompt, and the tail end of a list of 10 items. I couldn't figure out how to scroll up the screen to read the list. PageUp, Shift + PageUP, + PageUP... I tried a bunch.

    4. One of the last items in the list explained how to get into X (by typing xinit). So I got into X with XFCE fine. But the refresh rate is 60Hz and I fear my eyes are going to start bleeding pretty soon.

    5. XFCE has auto-hide toolbars on the top and bottom of the screen. I find these quite distracting.

    That's about it so far. It's neat to be able to play around with an OS that lives on a CD, but I'm wondering how useful this project is. Knoppix is a slick way of showing what a free non-MS operating system can do. Pop in the CD, boot it up, and you'll end up in a nice graphical interface with programs to try out. Plus it's extremely handy to use as a "rescue" CD for systems whose operating systems will not boot for various reasons.

    But where does FreeSBIE fit in? As a rescue CD for those who know BSD well but not Linux? To show off how FreeBSD can almost be as nice a desktop as as Linux (Knoppix)? If FreeBSD is aimed as a server OS ("The Power To Serve"), how useful is a Live CD?

    I don't mean to sound too negative here. It does seem like a neat project. I'm just failing to see its niche.

    • Re:My quick review (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Use the scroll lock key, and then the arrow keys to scroll the console...

    • Re:My quick review (Score:2, Informative)

      by ph43thon ( 619990 )
      it would seem to me that a LiveCD in all cases is good for reparing a system if something has gone horribly wrong.. like a Super Rescue Floppy. So, it's good for system administrators I guess. Also, fun for college students and the like to go into computer labs and boot from cd to goof around. Oh, and the fact that Knoppix doesn't allow bootup support for multiple languages isn't really a plus IMO. Unless, of course, you only use the LiveCD to demo FreeBSD.. but then you can just use the toolset to make
  • Throw it in an extra machine if you have an "oh shit" moment, like a dead box.

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