Hello, I'm new to linux. I've tried a bit redhat, mandrake, knoppix and Damn Small, and I managed to get them to work and I'm beginning to understand how all this works.
My problem is: I'm looking for a distribution with very specific criterias, and I hope you can help.
Here's the essentials:
1) Must be a small live distro. Hopefully under 50 mb, but a bit more is ok.
2) The GUI must be good, for I am really still lost in Linux.
3) It must be able to access FAT32 and NTFS
4) It must have rescue tools that are efficient to work on windows partitions

and....

5) I don't know if it even exists under linux, but I need a virus scanner for windows partitions, and as much win tools as possible (registery editor, etc)

And voila, that's about it. Of course, I've looked around and found lots and lots of distros. And I'm completely lost. So I guess what I'm asking for is not a strictly professional advice. I can read the descriptions of the distros and make my choice. But there's so much of them, so what I really need is a bit of personal advice or reviews.

Hope you can help.

Thanks in advance!

Finding a distribution that is both around 50 MB, has a nice GUI and a lot of tools will be very hard, if even possible. Especially the GUI takes up quite some space. May I ask why it needs to be so small, especially since you wanted a live distro? Why not just use a normal live cd (650-700 MB)?

I never heard of such a distro, but that does not necessarily mean that there is no such thing. Just keep looking.

I wanted it small enough to fit on any USB, but a live CD is still allright if there's no other choice. As for windows rescuing tools, I googled it and searched on distrowatch.com, but I couldn't find real efficient distros for that. I have a slow connection and can't afford to download many distros just to try them out. I've got to pick one or two and be sure they're ok.
My aim is to create a bootable CD that I can use to fix my friend's PCs because they always mess their system up and it's a tedious task to fix windows when it's not working properly. You can't just format because people want their files, and you can't access the files either, since wins is messed up. And sometimes a repair is not enough, so you either have to operate from DOS console, which is a prehistoric OS, or you must unscrew the HD, take it home, backup the files on numereous CDs, and then format, which can take from one to three days.
I figured if I could have a Live something (USB or CD) with enough tools to access any windows file system, with an antivirus and a registery editor, it would greatly reduced the amount of time lost.
Thanks for your answer.

For a basic rescue CD try:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

PCLinuxOS, Knoppix, among others

PCLinuxOS, Knoppix, among others

Either PCLinuxOS or Knoppix have good repartitioning programs. Really there aren't many Windows rescue tools for Linux - the Linux rescue tools are for Linux.

Clamav will scan for windows viruses. Linux have programs to edit the Windows registry AFAIK.

You won't get all of this in 50MB though - full LiveCDs with nice GUIs usually take up a whole CD.

one word. slax.

http://slax.linux-live.org/

it prolly isnt exactly what you want (space-wise) but it is probably the only thing that is worth running on a usb drive.

hello,

Try PUPPY Linux (http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ )

thanks,
Kirtimaan

Although it doesn't have a fancy GUI (ie: no gui ) the Finnix project was recently revived. Finnix is an old old Live CD that's now Debian based, around ~95mb, and boots nice and fast (great for rescue). I just tried it out and it seems to fit the bill perfectly, so maybe it can be of some use to you. http://www.finnix.org/

Hey, thank you all for your answers. I am going to check out all of these, and I might even try finnix (I worked for years under DOS, linux console cannot possibly be that complicated, does it). I'll come back here and post the results of my investigations in case anyone's having the same request I do and searches the forum in quest for answers. Thanks again.

if your friends keep messing up their pcs, you could simply make a separate partition where they can drop there personal files (a bit like a /home partition)
then you can just format there pcs
it would shure save you a lot of painful hours trying to fix a problem
or you could always install linux

by the way, knoppix has a good live cd
but I think its pretty demanding (it runs kde, so a nice but heavy gui)
don't know about any windows repairtools either

DSL, Ultimatebootcd, Puppy, If their is something they don't have, install it.