[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]
“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.”