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Is it the End of the Road for Live CDs?

Posted by scrubs on · 3 comments
Free Software Magazine; By Gary Richmond 		Mail this story
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I was window shopping in a high street electronics store a few days ago. I was delighted to see a shelf display full of netbooks from vendors like Samsung, Acer, Dell, Advent and Asus (of course), to name a few. It looked like the Asus EeePC had launched an idea whose time had come and in the process possibly heralded the long withdrawing roar of the live CD. I now knew how General Adolf Galland felt during the Battle of Berlin when he recorded that when he saw Allied fighters escorting the bombers all the way to the target and back he knew the war was over. Like Mark Twain, predictions of the death of live CDs may be premature but here’s why I think that device convergence and software development may, like those escorting fighters, mark the end of the line for live CDs.

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Comments (3)

azerthoth ·
How he got from LiveCD's being a thing of the past due to lack of persistance to naturally progressing to Netbooks is beyond me. He made a wonderful case for thumbdrive/media card booting, and truth be told those are actually easier to deal with than CD/DVD's after you know the trick.

Live distributions are hardly a thing of the past, the medium that they are run from, thats a different story. What the heck Netbooks have to do with it is beyond me, my OLPC boots and runs from a SD card and has a 80 gig USB drive attached that has /swap and /home on it. The SD card is the key, not the fact that it's a "Netbook"

Good article, terrible logic.
ColonelPanik ·
az.....th, You are right, lots of jumbled thoughts. SSM (solid state media) is handy and cool but my "can't lose this" info is on CDs. They don't leave the house, except when I bury them in the backyard. Don't leave home without some kind of Live CD so you can rescue files for some winders smuck.

What would you think of an OLPC as a netbook? For someone that "works" while away from home?

Saw a cool sig on a blog. "My other OLPC is in Bolivia"
d0nk3y ·
I think the other thing with the booting from a USB stick is the fact that a bunch of older machines (that are still working fine and are great for running linux on) don't actually have the capability to boot from USB.

Much like the older non-El Torito capable CD drives that also couldn't be booted from - we just have to wait a few years until most everything can boot from USB before we chuck out the CD's!

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