LiveCD
From Granular Linux Documentation
Introduction
A LiveCD is a Linux distribution, of size less than or equal to the standard CD size (700MB), that has the ability to operate in "live mode". When a LiveCD distro is burned on a CD and put into the CD/DVD drive, the computer boots from the CD instead of hard disk, and the Linux distro automatically starts.
Granular comes as an installable LiveCD and LiveDVD that you can use to first try Granular in the live mode and, if you like it, install it on harddisk.
Note that a LiveCD of the size of a DVD is called a LiveDVD.
Some LiveCDs
Other than Granular, some of the LiveCDs that are available include:
- Knoppix (this is from where it all began!)
- Fedora (Kadischi)
- SimplyMEPIS
- Ubuntu
- Mandriva One
- PCLinuxOS
and many more...
Creating LiveCDs
With the help of some tools, you can easily create your own custom LiveCD, sometimes called a Remaster. You would want to create a custom LiveCD because:
- You want to remaster the existing distro to add/remove functionality and release it for use by others
- You just want to take a snapshot of the current system, its configuration, and installed applications. You can use this snapshot as a backup to install your OS, back to the saved configuration settings, at the time of a system failure.
To help you create a LiveCD, Granular comes with 2 pre-installed applications:
- remasterme
- mklivecd
Both of these are command-line based tools. If you want a GUI based tool, then install the package remaster_gui using Synaptic Package Manager.
