Which is better: live DVD or HDD install?
 

Hi everyone,
I learned that the AVLinux distro is a live DVD (but can be installed to HDD).
And I wondered, "wouldn't a distro that specializes in audio/video work be better/faster on the HDD??"

Am I wrong? Is a live DVD faster or perform better? Where would I save my created files?


Thanks in advance,
brian

You would save your created files on the hard disc. They would be left there when you shut down, as the OS on hte live dvd writes to the HDD just like the OS on your computer could write to a thumb drive.

The better option would be to install the OS on hdd. Then you'll be able to save your data and when again you'll restart your machine to work on, then you don't have to load the LiveCD again and again. Which can consume your time in loading the CD first and then work. Also using the LiveCD on a machine is a slow process for working while once an OS has been installed on machine then it can be access quickly with the fast booting process and within a minute your system will be up and able to use OS, which can depends on your machine's hardware configuration.

It seems odd to me that a distro meant to capture audio would use a DVD or USB drive rather than a hard drive by default.
I would expect a hard drive install to be faster and, also, some things like sound cards are not always set up correctly in a default install so some changes would likely be necessary.
I would be interested to hear the rationale behind the idea of making an audio-specialised distro a live one.

Maybe it's so you can check whether all of your hardware is compatible before doing a full-on install.

Isn't that the point of all live distros? So you can test them out, see how well they work and whether or not you like them, before you commit and partition your hard drive for them. I don't see the point in running any live distro permanently, with the exception of portable "repair" installs to let you fix broken computers using your own live disc/USB and a suite of debug utilities.

Live distros are slow, finicky, and can't really be updated. Even the ones on USB with persistent storage often get corrupted with too much use.

I think it's the blurb on Distrowatch that's misleading as it seems to suggest that it's primarily meant to be run as a live distro (to my reading anyhow).
After reading the actual website for the distro it seems they do seem to suggest that installing it is a better choice.
Personally, though, I tend to find live distros don't work as well on slightly out of the ordinary hardware configurations so can put you off what would be a working distribution otherwise.
Edit: I notice it says it's 32bit which seems odd. Depending on what you're after it might make more sense to run Ubuntu Studio or 64studio. Though I'll admit I don't know enough to know of any specific reasons to go for 64bit over 32bit.

One of the great things brought to us by Klaus Knopper is the live cd/dvd/usb.

Almost every distro offers a live version as a great way to test or try their distro. It is simple for a new user to see how it work. Then if you are happy and do want to improve speed and make changes, you would need to install it to a hard drive. Under some conditions, a live cd could be just as fast or faster but that would be rare and a number of things would have to be true. Generally a boot that copies the disk data to a ramdisk would be fastest way to run it.



From distrowatch today.

"AV Linux is a versatile, Debian-based distribution featuring a large collection of audio and video production software. Additionally, it also includes a custom kernel with IRQ threading enabled for low-latency audio performance. AV Linux can be run directly from a live DVD or a live USB storage device, though it can also be installed on a hard disk and used as a general-purpose operating system for everyday tasks."

But many live distros are not designed to be installed, although you can install them virtually if you want to but they are not stable. In other words they are designed to be an OS only on disks. There are number of live distros available but only some of them can be installed and would be stable on your HDD, some of them are Ubuntu, Mepis, Apodio, Mandriva, etc..
And you can also check the Live CD List which could be very helpful.

To explain my above post it was which I took to mean this was a secondary consideration.
I agree that live distros are a good idea for auditioning but I sometimes think that a little too much store is put by whether they work or not.

Thanks everyone for the input! :)

I was always of the impression that a live DVD/CD would not be as fast as a HDD install, which seems to be what I'm seeing in your posts.

The fact that some distros are "live only" made me think that running a PC with a live CD would have certain advantages, such as not stressing the system so much. Like on older PCs, where the hardware might be slower than the CD reader..

brian

You can check some pros and cons of live CD/DVD.

My dad asked me to install Linux on his studio PC last week so he could drop the aging Windows XP from it.
Everything worked except for the line-in of the Terratec soundcard. No matter which setting we tried, it wouldn't work. In XP it worked flawlessly.

Testing everything out like that from a live DVD was a terribly slow experience. Everything had to be loaded from the DVD drive. I'd recommend a hard disk installation. It will save you lots of time.

The only live cd that I know of that discourages a real install is Gentoo live.
Older knoppix had a few ways but it wasn't worth the effort to me at least.


If you are stuck between real and cd then I'd suggest you need a virtual machine.

There are some distros that are live only, such as PureOS, Porteus, and (I think) ArchBang.

Well, at the moment, AVLinux is installed on the HDD and seems to work fine, except that when I installed the firewall (ufw) it doesn't even permit web browsing, so I have to figure out the configurations. -Strange, since usually ufw allows web browsing in automatic. Even the default activation at start-up requires a change to the init file.

brian

Running a LiveCD will 'stress' the system just as much as running from an install to the HDD...in the worst case scenario.

In most cases, running from an install to the HDD will use less CPU power, less RAM, etc. than running from a liveCD/DVD.

BTW, any system that will run a current linux distro is capable of dealing with data at much higher speeds than CD/DVD drives can read it.