As you probably know I a big fan of the Linux OS and find it a lot more useful and stable than Windows. Linux has a unique property that it can be installed on and run from the most unlikely systems/devices.
One of the most useful installs are the Linux Live CD’s. These are compressed CD images of a complete linux OS and are available for free with almost no restrictions. A lot of the live distro’s are created with a specific purpose and are fine-tuned for it.
Below is a list of the various Linux Distro’s and what they specialize in:
- Knoppix: This is one of the most famous Live Linux distro’s. It is based on Debian and contains over 2 GB of software on one CD.
- Kanotix: This is a Linux Live CD based on KNOPPIX technology using mostly pure Debian/sid. Contains more updated packages than Knoppix.
- F.I.R.E: FIRE is a portable bootable cdrom based distribution with the goal of providing an immediate environment to perform forensic analysis, incident response, data recovery, virus scanning and vulnerability assessment. Very Useful
- Penguin Sleuth Kit Bootable CD: A GUI based Bootable CD based on KNOPPIX for forensic previewing of live systems with some security and sys admin tools.
- War Linux: This distro is dedicated to War Drivers. Officially It’s main intended use is for systems administrators that want to audit and evaluate their wireless network installations but it works great for wardriving also.
- Ultimate Boot CD: Not exactly a Live Linux distro but still a pretty useful disk to have in your collection. It allows you to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. It has loads of tools and has saved my backside a couple of times.
A more complete list of Distro’s is available at: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. I might not reply immediately but I will try to answer your questions or point you in the right direction (I hope)
– Suramya