"PTS Desktop Live is a Linux distribution designed to provide a free software platform for carrying out system tests and hardware benchmarks in an automated, reproducible, and effective manner. PTS Desktop Live is designed around the Phoronix Test Suite with the operating system itself consisting of a stripped down Linux environment, then built upon that is the Phoronix Test Suite with its test profiles and suites. This distribution is not a standard Linux desktop with the normal throng of packages. Testing with PTS Desktop Live is intended to be via a Live DVD or Live USB (i.e. flash drive or memory card) environment. PTS Desktop Live makes it very easy to deploy the Phoronix Test Suite across an array of systems, isolates any software differences when seeking to perform hardware comparisons, and is designed to be very easy to carry out these Linux benchmarks even for a first-time Linux user.
"The inaugural release of this operating system is PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (codenamed "Gernlinden") and is combined with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. The Gernlinden release ships with more than 50 open-source test profiles and with all needed files being located on the disc image. PTS Desktop Live uses the GTK2 GUI dialog for the Phoronix Test Suite by default, but the CLI options are also accessible. This initial 2009.3 release should be considered a beta or technology preview release with there still being some "rough edges" to this build when it comes to some minor details, customizations, and extra test-related features, but this will all be enhanced in forthcoming releases. Future releases of this distribution will also contain greater work when it comes to optimizing the Linux kernel and related components for use on the latest high-end hardware and other performance related tweaking. There are also some features accessible through the command-line version of the Phoronix Test Suite that are not yet implemented from the GUI, but that too will be addressed in future releases."
