I know "which distro is best" is a bad topic but I really need a good liveCD seeing as how my harddrive broke (no data was lost, but I dont have an OS anymore). I was looking on wikipedia's list of distros but there are way too many and most dont have a lot.

So far my favorite is Ubuntu -- good set of apps, a lot faster than knoppix, but lacks abiword (which I need for school stuff).

PuppyLinux is cool cause it doesn't have to spin the CD around, ie, it's fast. I kind of like the XFCE4 one but puppylinux is wierd, very wierd. I have one HD so I can make a puppy CD from scratch, but it has very few programs.

Anyway, what I want is this:
Abiword
Games (BZFlag, wesnoth, freecell...and the ability to configure for nvidia)
Firefox
And I like the idea of loading everything into RAM so things run faster.

But alternatively, is there any way to make the CD keep spinning 24/7 so it doesn't go to sleep then take time to wake up? Or can you make it go to sleep only after so many minuits? It's really annoying having to wait for the CD to start spinning.

You need AbiWord? there's a package for Ubuntu at
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/s...ll&release=all

If you want a LiveCD distro, check out DSL. It can load entirely into RAM, and it's only 50 MB. It can also be extended with MyDSL.

Knoppix can load into RAM if you have enough.

PCLinuxOS super gamer http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/6136 has America's Army, Cube, Doom 3 demo, Enemy Territory, Legends, Nexuiz, Privateer, Quake 4 demo, Soldier of Fortune, UFO: Alien Invasion, UT2004 demo, Wesnoth, BzFlag,Chromium3D, Pinball, Frozen Bubble, Neverball, Neverput, Penguin Racer, Supertux, Tuxkart, Pysol, Foobillards. Doesnt have toram cheatcode tho. My Nvidia geforce 5200 detected right away and the graphics optimised for gaming. Huge downloadmay be a problem.

I wish I would've used resiezer... I have 67 free MB but I dotn want to loose any data.

Anyway, how do you load a liveCD into RAM? I found this site claiming you can do it but it only talks about putting knoppix on your HD, http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2448 .

Ubuntu wont install anything with synaptic but it could if it were in RAM -- and it could be coppied onto another CD or on the HD. It may be possible to copy it onto a HD, chroot, install whatever, then boot puppy or damn small linux and burn it. The only problem is you'd never know if it were working properly which is why RAM is a much better idea.

Btw that PCLinux gamer looks pretty cool but the torrent isn't healthy. It'd be pretty sweat if it downloads.

Think the kernel used has to support ram disks and not all live distros have a toram option. Knoppix does btw, knoppix toram at the boot prompt. Know what you mean about super gamer download - i actually bought it to save heartache.

Ok so let me get this strait. If you configure the kernel to support ram disks and boot w/ the option toram, it'll load into RAM and free the CD? Kind of like how the article talked about tohd, fromhd, and bootfrom?

That way you can custom configure a liveCD and not have to search around for one you like! Remove everythign you dotn want, add what you do, keep it small (I'm guessing half your RAM), then move it all to a CD/DVD! "linux toram"

Is there by any chance a way to specify what parts go into RAM? If you run an app not in RAM you'd have to put the CD in for it to read from. Like install xfce4/kde/gnome/ all in /opt and only load /opt/xfce4/ or gnome depending on what desktop you decide to run. Do the same thing w/ apps you're less likely to use.

There has to be an article about all of this somewhere...

Way over my head now but heres how to remaster knoppix http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Remastering_Howto - really dont know technical side of the toram stuff, sure someone does tho.

Ok, I want to make a custom LiveCD but almost every doc I've found on the Internet requires you already have a distro installed. This is exactly what I dont have and is why I need a LiveCD!

I'm thinking though, w/ isolinux, you could boot a CD and the procedure for creating a liveCD wouldn't notice that you;re not in a HD install. I'd like to see the actual linux install inside the CD but there's always isolinux and a big file, like KNOPPIX, which I assume is the compressed/whatever root fielsystem.

Does anybody have any idea of how I could do this w/ out the option of installing to a HD?