What is Digg?105 Comments
- MuffinFlavored, on 07/13/2008, -6/+59So, I should use Linux, only to fix Windows?
Thanks CNet. - likwidtek, on 07/13/2008, -0/+40Live CDs are pretty sweet for snooping too. :)
- TheWindBlows, on 07/12/2008, -7/+35"You can set them loose on Firefox running off a Live CD and be 100% sure they won't screw up the installed copy of Windows in any way, shape or form."
Yeah....about that.... - linuxeventually, on 07/13/2008, -0/+14Knoppix and Puppy Linux FTW. I keep the latter on my thumbdrive connected to my retractable keychain utility belt.
- blinky04, on 07/13/2008, -0/+13Yes? I'm listening?
- inactive, on 07/13/2008, -1/+14Yeah, you never have to use them again once it's installed because of the update system.
- DeathGod321, on 07/13/2008, -15/+27Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
(I used this a few years back, so I don't know if there is anythign newer.)
Buried for typical cnet spam. They could atleast do a two second google search before writing an entire article. - deathfix, on 07/13/2008, -6/+16Hail, Lord Linux! Hail, Lord Linux! Forgive us, Great Lord, for our mumblings of grub and discontent; who so loved Unix that he sent his only begotten son, Torvalds, to show us the way; whose great Crons at which we can only marvel! Ye, whose glorious tar balls which we are truly unworthy to lick from thy feet; who doth set before us, the unreachable and unfathomable CUPS from which only the most holy dare drink; who did make happen, the incomprehensible Nvidia display appear across the wondrous heavens of GUI.
Yet, we know Lord, in times of doubt that thou sendest thine daemons to try and test our knowledge and we know that if we only had faith the size of the Kernel, we could say to this Gnome desktop, “Move from here to there”, and it will move. We could say to this terminal, “Be unRooted and planted in the fertile open source fields”, and it would obey and nothing will be impossible for us.
Hear our pleas, O Lord, and forgive us our incoherent yums as we forgive our drivers. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Windoze, for thine is the root:>, the acpi and the error free installation, forever, and ever. EOF.
{…ends with much groveling and bowing in the nether regions} - joshualamgroup, on 07/13/2008, -0/+9BackTrack distro!
- thecheatah, on 07/13/2008, -0/+8Linux is a tool. Use it for whatever!
- JoCoProductions, on 07/13/2008, -1/+8I am actually booted off the liveCD right now believe it or not because my new hard drive is being stubborn when installing XP because it doesn't have the SATA drivers. It's extremely convenient to be able to boot into essentially a full operating system, partition my hard drive and search for some help using firefox off of just a cd that requires no drivers and no nonsense.
The only downside is no flash is built into firefox under Ubuntu's liveCD and you cannot download it since you are not booted off the HD. Oh well... - sirhomer, on 07/13/2008, -1/+8Here is a good distro designed specifically for system recovery: http://www.sysresccd.org/
Here is a good security testing distro: http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html
Backtrack comes with a ton of hacking tools.
Interestingly enough, for partition management and data recovery from NTFS shares, any modern LiveCD will do, even Ubuntu. - thecheatah, on 07/13/2008, -0/+6So, you do network installs?
- korvins, on 07/13/2008, -2/+8Windows alternative is mentioned on the article, so I think you should spend two seconds reading the article before making this stupid comment.
Plus, why do you need to do all those steps with BartPE? If you only want to recover some files, and test the net there is no point in doing that. For using BartPE you need a valid license (200$), you need a running windows installation, build the liveCD (wtf?), and at least do up to 8 non-trivial steps. In the opposite, you simply put the liveCD, and restart.
You are not going to play Crysis, simply recover the files and exit. Plus I can tell you that can do much more with a Linux Live CD, than with Windows without anything installed on it (you can use paint, true). It is crazy when people thinks that a computer without Windows can do nothing. You should open your mind a bit and the advantages and disadvantages of each. - Joh739, on 07/13/2008, -1/+7It is still possible to screw up your os on the hard drive in the live cd, because one can mount a partition and read and write on it, also delete every thing, also the gnome partition editor has unlimited access to the hard drive.(What would a kid to with this?)
The best way to prevent this is to just pull out the IDE cable of the hard disk. - inactive, on 07/13/2008, -1/+7Frampton Comes Alive is my favorite live CD of all time.
- WoollyMittens, on 07/13/2008, -2/+7What makes you think a linux liive-cd wouldn't work on your mac? Do you even have a mac?
- raydeen, on 07/13/2008, -0/+5DSL 3.4 has been a life saver a number of times for me. One of my friends went surfing in the dirty shark infested corners of the net and borked Windows big time. Booted up with DSL and copied off his home folder to an external drive, formatted his HD, re-installed, copied his files back and told him NEVER NEVER NEVER use IE again.
And Hirens is good to have around too. ;) - Peterix, on 07/13/2008, -0/+5Well, on most liveCDs you actually can do that. Just start the package manager and do it. Every program installed that way requires some RAM though.
- roryk27, on 07/13/2008, -0/+4buried for linux hating
- duder, on 07/13/2008, -0/+4live cd? hell, why not a dvd full of them...
http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-det ... - ohmysac, on 07/13/2008, -0/+4There are plenty of other livecd distros that include flash. Many are Ubuntu based. Linux Mint comes to mind.
- 321george, on 07/13/2008, -2/+6sudo rm-rf
- thecheatah, on 07/13/2008, -0/+4if your running ubuntu, you can still download and install packages. In ubuntu, install the flashplugin-nonfree package. You will be able to use flash off of the live cd (it will download the flash). You can actually install ANY package as long as it doesnt require a restart (none, besides kernel updates do).
- korvins, on 07/13/2008, -0/+4Plus, with BartPE, you will have no partitioning program, no way to open docs... and I wonder how you can connect to the net (not to talk about proper screen resolution and other periphericals), given that windows Xp does not have drivers on it?
It has happened to me several times... After doing a thousand "intelligent" wizards on windows I could not connect to the net. I rebooted with Knoppix or Ubuntu LiveCD and I had network straight away... So I asked myself: what are those wizards really doing? - mikedoth, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3I wish people would help the Haiku project. An OS that could really replace Windows.
- Pacificblue, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3Hiren Boot CD?? Its nice..
- WoollyMittens, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3I've given up on helping people with their trojans and exploits. You spend hours rescuing their precious files, but however much you warn them to use firefox and antivirus software, the first thing they do is return to Internet Explorer and opening "funny" executables.
- anonymous457, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3WinPE, BartsPE, VistaPE, LiveXP, there are tons of non-linux alternatives that kick ass as well
- bootup, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3That is why you charge them $200 per incident-and then just backup documents and settings and reinstall MS Windows.
- Zaggynl, on 07/13/2008, -1/+4http://www.ubcd4win.com/ can do the same and more.
- neko, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3Live CDs really show off Linux's strength. And the interesting thing I find is, the reason Live environments can work so well is something which often gets a lot of criticism: the Unix filesystem layout.
Every now and again, I'll see some comment along the lines of "Waaah, /bin, /usr, /lib, /etc, /tmp, /var, this is all too confusing, why can't I just install everything to the first hard drive which is conveniently called C". Okay, that was exaggerated. You get the idea. The thing is, separating a package into the components which are executable, the shared libraries it needs, the configuration files and so on means that you can structure your LiveCD so that most things are read-only. The only places you might need to write to at run-time are /tmp, /etc, and /var (well, maybe /home, but symlinks can save you trouble here..), and these can go on a tmpfs when booting off CD.
Doing the same thing for windows programs is much harder as they don't have an existing convention on what should be writable and what shouldn't.
Then there's that whole 'C:' thing. - freaky2k, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3I'm an avid windows user and I have carried around a linux live CD for about 5 years. They can be very, very useful when you have a problem. While linux doesn't work for me as a full OS...since I'm a gamer...it's still very usable and I love it for what it can do for me.
- zwaldowski, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3So, wouldn't that be the recovery system if it was "protected" in Windows? Yay, you just slipstreamed over crapware!
- LeviTheSmith, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3Why bury for Linux?
- MasterChi, on 07/13/2008, -1/+4Many less things such as? Please do list and I can almost guarantee i can recover Windows with the same or similar utilities. Everything from all sorts of hardware tests, file recovery, wireless networking (yes one thing that even full blown linux has trouble with we can do in a windows live cd), partitioning, cmos password reset, windows password reset or recover, vnc, and so much more.
- blooby, on 07/13/2008, -0/+3In the article it does mention Ultimate Boot CD for Windows at the bottom. Has this been recently added or didn't you RTFA?
- DestroyFascism, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2It open protected drives from Compaq. I managed to slipstream Sp3 into a friends Compaq XP (original) image and from there load and boot from it.
- Smegzor, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Don't be a tool, use Linux! Oh wait..
- inactive, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Seriously. Dumb people = money for the smart.
- ZutroyZuuts, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Thought it might have been the Super Winpe disc, but probably not on Lifehacker.
Maybe it was this you saw?
http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/l ... - explodingzebras, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2IMHO VirtualBox is much more configurable and flexible than Microsoft's (bought from Connectix) Virtual PC. VMware is good too but nor entirely free. I use Virtualbox on ubuntu to run XP, and also VMware to run Mac OSX, which I can't get working in virtualbox.
- inactive, on 07/13/2008, -2/+4Agreed. My response was going to be about the same but you beat me to it. I have run Linux and Windows from ram for years. It is a great to way use an untrusted system without altering their installs.
- Smegzor, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Damn those utility belts are useful! Just the thing when caught in a tight spot against some badass Windows users.
- jabiggs3, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Not sure I understand the question... Ubuntu 6.06 is also called "Dapper Drake" and was released in June '06. The version numbers correspond to the release date: y.mm --> y = year, mm = month
- jabiggs3, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Enjoyed this article! Well done, Michael Horowitz. Excellent advice. An additional option to note is that it is possible to run Linux directly off of a bootable USB drive as well. Not surprisingly, it won't run very fast. And with the emergence of cloud computing and virtual PCs, this is perhaps less novel than it was in the past - but I think it's pretty cool nonetheless. Not necessarily something for a new Linux user, but it doesn't take very long to learn enough about Linux to follow the plethora of online guides available on the subject (not to mention, the exercise offers yet another opportunity to learn more about the OS).
- MattBD, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2I like Knoppix myself (one of the best live CD's there is). A few months back my dad's computer kept on BSOD-ing every time he booted it up - turned out the motherboard had been fried by a power surge. But it was still up to booting Knoppix, so I used that to retrieve his files from the computer and save them to a flash drive.
He would have been in serious ***** if I'd not been able to do so as he was the executor of my gran's estate and a load of things he needed for that were on there, so it really was a lifesaver. - Genma, on 07/13/2008, -1/+3I use both bartpe and gparted+clonezilla live cd, two best all purpose solutions for both camps imo. there are situations where one or the other might be more useful, and both have made things alot easier than they could have been in many cases. either of which can also be thrown onto some sort of usb key, very convenient.
he kind of shrugged off the windows solution in the article as if it was complicated or inconvenient in some way to do it, inferior or otherwise not as good. the idea is just to use the best tool for the problem so the obvious bias is annoying. there are of course some things you could do with bart or ubcd that you wouldn't be able to do in a linux env. - twiztidsinz, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2There was an article on Digg a while back (might have been a LifeHacker with an external link to a blog).. the story had a CD Bootdisk that had a ton of tools and stuff on it used to repair, fix and tinker with preinstalled OS using the LiveCD. By the time I read the article, the download link was dead..
Anyone have an idea as to what it was called? and/or where I can get it? - NinjaNato, on 07/13/2008, -0/+2Ubuntu version 6.06?
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