try lots of linux on one dvd?
 

Hi! I'm back after a long break, seems windows is not going to be my thing anymore, viruses suck, although that might have been my fault, surfing while drunk can be hazardous to your pc's health...

Anyway, after going straight to the latest Ubuntu release and really not liking it, slow and clunky I thought, I am in the market for something really lightweight perhaps. I know they all seem to do live cd's now, which is great, but at the moment, I only have a few dvd's to spare, and I thought "can't they just put the latest releases of the lightweight ones together on a dvd or 2?" I know it's probably been done already and I just haven't found the right google search term for it, that's usually the case whenever I think of something, but so far I've drawn a blank.

Does it exist? A dvd (or a bunch of them) with the latest lightweight linuxes (is that a valid plural? :OS ) all clumped together so I can choose which live dvd to try when I boot it.

It'd make it a bit cheaper to burn, and a lot quicker and more fun to try out and find my perfect distro, I would love to try it if such a project exists.

Thanks for any help you can give, I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't happened yet, but I see no reason for it not existing.

cheers

Dave

Two things come to my mind here:
1. Test the distros in a virtual machine.
2. Test the distros on your physical machine, but boot from USB.

Both ways you don't need to burn a CD/DVD and you will get noticeably speed improvements.

Thanks TobiSGD, it's not a great machine, so VM is pretty much out I think, plus, I'm not sure how to do it in the linux environment. USB booting might be an option if I can figure out how to do it, more googling ahead I expect...

DVD booting, I'm very familiar with, I was hoping it may have been done already and I've just missed it so far, failing any good suggestions about it in the next week or so, I'll have to go with the usb thing, but I'm not even sure the target machine can boot from usb.

It would help if you can post the specs of that machine. install lshw, run it from the commandline and post it here (between code-tags).
About that DVD-thing, the problem is that there are many distributions out there and they don't have a coordinated release schedule, so you have to remaster the whole thing every time a distro gets a new release. I doubt that anyone will do that work just for fun.

Sorry TobiSGD, you're obviously trying to be helpful, and I very much appreciate your time, I think lshw is installed, however, running it from the command line means I have to access it from the new gui, which doesn't seem to want me to do it (I have to use sudo, and then remember how to pipe a command to an output file, my memory fails me a.t.m.) apparently putting a default shortcut to a terminal window is not the Ubuntu way anymore, which is a pity, because it could potentially help to solve many a problem very quickly, I will make a few attempts by Tuesday, but I have to sleep now, work requires me to be awake unfortunately :O(.

I take your point about the release dates and such, but it doesn't always HAVE to be the latest does it? I'm just trying to get an idea of what's going to work ok and what isn't, I'm thinking Minty at the mo [I'm pretty sure it'd work just dandy, but it seems like a popular copout ;O) ], I would very much like to see some of the contenders first.

I guess that I see a system screw up as a time to experiment, I want to capitalise on the moment of frustration in as little time as possible :O)

Thanks again, and if I get Ubuntu to co-operate, (and even if I don't) lshw will be coming.

The file "lshw-output" will now contain the output.

You should be able to go to a terminal easily with pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 , this should work at the log-in screen, so you don't need to log into the GUI. You can get back to the GUI with Alt+F7.
For redirecting output:will create a file output which contains the output of lshw.

I would use "&>" instead of ">", so that error output goes to the file, too.

lshw lists the hardware in that machine, no need for redirecting errors here. But in general you are right of course.

Thanks for that guys (or gals) I'd totally forgotten the ctrl+alt+f1 thing it has been too long since my last venture to linux. Anyway, here's my results, they are a bit on the long side, and don't mean a lot to me, but anyway, the question at the moment is, can the following machine boot from usbif it can, I'll be looking into how to do it very soon, or if anyone can suggest a really really good distro for such a computer, I'm all ears :)

The ASUS P5KPL-AM is a board well known to me, it has absolutely no problems with booting from USB.
I am somewhat astonished that you have problems with running Ubuntu on that setup, should run fine.

Sidenote: I would recommend to buy a cheap processor for that machine, may be a Pentium E Dualcore from the 2000 series, should speed up things a lot, and they are really cheap.

Not to derail this thread, but this is what happens on my Arch Linux installation:

From post #4:Maybe you should try the same? ;)

Thanks for the tip on the processor TobiSGD, I seem to recall that the RAM could do with a little beefing up as well. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just a little on the unresponsive side,

MTK358, that is a curious error, to my admittedly untrained eye, it would suggest that lshw is not installed on that distro, or they use another command to do similar things (I really don't know my way around dependencies and packages, what works with what can be very confusing to a newbie!), but taking a look at your rep, I'd guess you'd thought of that already.

Pah! Beaten to it!

For usb booting I've tried the linux way with no luck so far, then I stumbled across this one

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/en/home

it's a windows thing, but I tried it under wine anyway (you can always hope) it failed miserably.

Moved it over to a windows machine and made a boot disk of slitaz, and I'm pretty impressed, (couldn't find how to set screen resolution though, it was a touch too small for my liking) I'll see what else works with that, maybe I'll set up as a multiboot machine, even though it scares me a bit, small linux can be quite tweaky it seems about plugins and so on.

So I think I'll need to keep a full on Ubuntu on the same drive. My biggest problem with Ubuntu is the application starter, which is quite a thing to have problems with, it hangs sometimes, doesn't start at others and (thankfully) works quite often.