FreeBSD Based Live CDs

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."

I'm there!

i'd been meaning to give one of the BSDs and other try. maybe nows the time.

good news.

FreeSBIE?

At least if I mess up the CD burning, I won't get a coaster!

Hopefully eventually

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.

Re:Hopefully eventually

the guys over at unixpunx [unixpunx.org]have a distrib that fits on a mini CD

no business card, but...

I've had a NetBSD 1.6 LiveCD sitting in my briefcase for about a year now. Why are these people claiming to be the first ones to do it?

Not much info available

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

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

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

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

... 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

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

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

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

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

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.

BSD isn't a hard install

" 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

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.

Re:BSD isn't a hard install

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

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.

Re:BSD isn't a hard install

I found the NetBSD disklabel tool difficult to use, so I used OpenBSD to slice my disk. But other than that, no I agree, the BSD'es are very easy to install.

OpenBSD is wonderfully easy to install.

Available for purchase

Just seen it at blcds.com for sale, if anyone's interested

Now?

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?

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

Another FreeBSD-based live CD is BSDeviant [unixpunx.org].

Plan 9

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

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.

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.

> 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!

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??

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.

I wonder why...

...the FreeBSD LiveCD [sourceforge.net] wasn't mentioned.

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

DragonFly BSD

DragonFly BSD comes on a Live CD; it's going to be the standard installation/demo/rescue disk.

Its a shame linux doesnt work this well

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???

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???

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...

Er... "Now?"

"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.

"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!

You are missing (one of) the points!

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

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...

http://people.su.se/~jj/FreeSBIE-1.0-i386.iso.torr ent

Re:And the torrent...

in link form [people.su.se]

Uh oh.....

Live CD? BSD?

The puns that can be made here...

Dead, LiveCD, make up your mind...

This should kick of a nice, long round of "BSD is Live" jokes.

will it boot on my machine?

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

Solaris LiveCD

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 get me wrong, as I do enjoy the variety. I wonder if Chris ever wrote up how he did it. It's probably not that hard to to do now, but back then that was cool stuff.

why all foreign?

I've noticed that nearly all the live cds are developed outside the United States. Is there a reason why this sort of software is more appealing in say, Germany, Italy, or Brasil than the US of A?

Maybe this is simply more verification that the American are beginning to suffer technologically from inferior mathematics and science education.

Finally!

Personally I use GNU/Linux frequently and I love it. I have never chosen not to use FreeBSD, but all my machines have Debian GNU/Linux more or less automatically. For a long while, I've been wanting to try out FreeBSD, but haven't had the spare machine to install it on. Now I don't need one...

Rollling your own

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 for various pets and livestock (that part should be simple), as well as a database that can be used for husbandry and breeding purposes.

I don't know whether putting a live database on a pre-canned OS is a good idea, due to security issues or whatnot. I would assume that restricting access to the db to local accounts would be the way to go, etc. etc.

Anyone have experience building their own, and want to share the experience?

x86 Only?

I have a Powerbook12 and have not gotten one LiveCd to boot properly. Gentoo has come the closest ,but it too craps out.

ALLRIGHT!!

Now I can finally make use of all those Knoppix FriSBEEs I've burned over the years...

~m

FreeBSD for newbies

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

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

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.

What do you mean ...FreeBSD ?

All the trolls told me BSD is dead ...WHAT ! you mean whatever the trolls say are not tru ?

One use.

Throw it in an extra machine if you have an "oh shit" moment, like a dead box.

So much for uptime:

panic: page fault
uptime: 1s
Press key on console to reboot...

This on my dual Athlon system. Is there a problem with multi-CPU support?

Or perhaps an Athlon-ism has bitten me?

I guess I wasn't really that interested in trying BSD anyway...

Gimmie more...

I want a bootable-CD based BSD Cluster... anyone else?

Obviously, it's the license.

Linux has had live CDs for several years, and BSD is finally catching up. Obviously, it's the BSD license that's holding back BSD and keeping Linux technically superior to BSD in all aspects.

;-)

Portable servers.

If you are moving around alot (like me), and want to run a web-server (like me), this is probably the sollution: Visit a friend, ask to borow one of his/her unused PCs for a day or two, pop it in. The only problem is local storage: Some web-servers, for instance those who run php/cgi/whatever to generate info stored locally need somewhere to store that info. If its not much, you can probably just use a floppy, but if there's more than 1.44Mb, then youve got a problem. Making FreesBIE compatible with those USB-drives would be a great idea.

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

Linux needs LiveCDs, but the BSDs certainly stand on their own.

Why is this ? IMHO, Linux stands just fine on its own. People have been talking on slashdot about how they use the Live CDs to show people what Linux can do, and to run Linux where you cannot install etc, I can't see why it should be any different with a BSD live cd. My guess is that it will be used as the Linux live cd's, to test and try. I think it's a good idea, and I will most certainly try it, I don't buy your idea that BSD stands better on its own than Linux though.

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

The purpose of the live CD is not as your actual OS. It is used for testing the operating system to see if it works correctly with your hardware. I have also used P.H.L.A.K [phlak.org] (A lighweight, hackery live CD also, like knoppix based on debian)for disaster recovery on windows systems. It works quite well.

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

LiveCDs have alot of purposes, I use them as servers. I run internet based games at work, At the end of the registration periods we need about 2,3,4 or more webservers just for a couple of hours to handle the load (and we have quite a few to begin with). I have a LiveCD which I can pop into any workstation and have a instant webserver (No reformating of windows machines that is).

It's based on knoppix, only took me a couple of hours to work ou how to remaster [knoppix.net] it to suit my needs.

LiveCDs are cool.

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

Especially for Firewalls, it is a good idea to use (modified) live-CDs. This way, everything is stored on a read-only filesystem, even in the rare case of a BSD remote root exploit, a reboot fixes everything.

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

If there's a remote root exploit, rebooting is merely going to make an attacker wait five minutes and then re-run the exploit. A better solution is a CD-RW disk in a CD-ROM drive -- you can always reboot into a clean system, but if there are security issues, you can remove the disk, fix the necessary bits, and then reboot.

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

yes you can, there is command like knoppix-install or somethin' i already forgot, but i did it several times last year

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

I might be biting a troll here.. but you can install Knoppix.
Just open up a console, su, and run "knx-hdinstall". Its "just" a shellscript, so you can browse while installing. After install you get a Debian Sid system.

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

It has been there for ages. Open up a root shell and run knx-hdinstall

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

You can indeed install it -- the result is a kind of Debian-lite installation. It's probably better to install real Debian once Knoppix has led the way; installed Knoppix has some quirks, such as a tendency to read things from the CD image on the HD now and then.

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

knx-hdinstall

Dinivin

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

since like, forever.

there's few ways to do it, you can install the image to hd and run it from there. or do a normal installation(as other replier said, knx-hdinstall iirc).

however be aware that upgrading from this installed system to a normal debian system might not go as smoothly as you'd hope(it might though, but I'd rather use a 'proper' installation cd and do a netinstall).

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

"ObviouGuy" looks like an obvious troll. Regardless of how well an OS works, there are always going to be plenty of situations where a LiveCD proves invaluable. I would think someone savvy enough to be running BSD would know better then to spout such nonsense.

easiest way to put on Debian (or Linux at all)

Meefan:

under slightly older versions (I think up to Knoppix 3.2), type "sudo /usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall"

Under newer ones, I think you only need to type "knoppix-installer", but if you type "knoppix-" and hit tab, you'll see what the actual command is if that's not quite right ;)

timothy

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

As others have pointed out, you can indeed install Knoppix on a harddisk. Beware however that you will get a Debian Unstable system. This can sometimes lead to problems when doing apt-get upgrade (like apt suddenly deciding all by itself that KDE and all that depends on it really needs to be removed --that's why they call it unstable I guess)

If you're looking for the stability of Debian, do a "real" netinstall of the current stable version. If you want the cool new toys, then Knoppix is the easiest way to install a Debian that doesn't lag two years behind the other distros.

Re:You can install Knoppix...?!?!?

There is a "toram" boot prompt option which will run the whole cd from your RAM. Better have a gig. Never tried it (need another stick or two).

Re:Netcraft chimes in...

I must admit, I laughed at the name "FreeBSD Live". I'm disappointed that the trolls couldn't come up with a wittier piece of trollery given material like that.

Re:FreeBSD is a solid OS

It's a varient of "fishing," which is a varient of "trolling." Or something.