LXer: Is it the End of the Road for Live CDs?
 

Published at LXer:

I was window shopping in a high street electronics store a few days ago. I was delighted to see a shelf display full of netbooks from vendors like Samsung, Acer, Dell, Advent and Asus (of course), to name a few. It looked like the Asus EeePC had launched an idea whose time had come and in the process possibly heralded the long withdrawing roar of the live CD. I now knew how General Adolf Galland felt during the Battle of Berlin when he recorded that when he saw Allied fighters escorting the bombers all the way to the target and back he knew the war was over. Like Mark Twain, predictions of the death of live CDs may be premature but here’s why I think that device convergence and software development may, like those escorting fighters, mark the end of the line for live CDs.

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Sheesh, what a poltroon. The liveCD was never about the CD, it was about being able to boot a computer from something besides the hard drive and have a fully functional OS without installing a thing. The fact that they will increasingly run off of USB sticks instead of CDs is completely beside the point.

Agreed. And with upcoming hypervisor operating systems (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=3321for example) it will become commonplace to install and run all OSes in VM's.

A couple of years ago I wrote this:

That's why Linux and Windows and MacOSX are going to become unimportant. Not irrelevant, but more and more focused on running specific software inside VM containers: in other words, appliances. From an evolutionary perspective, consider this as a major environment change. The flora and fauna will adapt, and will lose features they no longer need.

Live CD's? No, Live Operating Systems..

That has got to be the most scatterbrained article I've tried to read in a long time. I recommend to the author to get a thorough psych evaluation ASAP.

I'm sorry to have confused you.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe that virtualization and specifically hypervisors are our future. I think Linux will be an extremely powerful force in that future; just not in the way most people think of it today. The future I see is VM appliances where the Linux OS has been stripped of unneeded features and finely designed and tuned for the appliance's specific needs.

Your "desktop" will be the combination of all the appliances you need, all controlled by the hypervisor OS which may or may not be Linux based - that remains to be seen. Most of the appliance apps will probably have Linux roots, though you won't necessarily know that - or care.


Does that help make it more understandable for you?

The only thing I can recommend is that you try to make the articles a bit more to the point, such that they at least attempt to stay on topic and each paragraph have a sense of meaning and purpose, and is able to stand on its own.

I can't put my finger on it, but that article is EXTREMELY difficult to read and follow. It's like almost every sentence is a new paragraph about a different idea unconnected to the previous. Sorry, but I just keep trying to make sense of it ... maybe it's me.

Either way, I recommend you at least try to improve your writing skills.

Well, it is a difficult concept for some people to grasp. I assure you - each paragraph IS related, but I agree that it can be difficult to see that if you aren't familiar with the concepts.

I wasn't really happy with that article either. The commenters seemed to understand it, but I knew a lot of people wouldn't. I tried again from a slightly different angle with the article I posted today - maybe that would be more to your liking.

Or, as you suggest, maybe my writing skills just aren't up to your needs. Different strokes for different folks: other people say they enjoy the way I write, but if it's not your cup of tea, I'd suggest you definitely shouldn't read anything else I publish :-)