CDLinux 0.9.2 Community Edition Review

Jul 06, 2009, 15:02 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Caitlyn Martin)

[ Thanks to Caitlyn Martin for this link. ]

"CDLinux had its first public release in early 2003. Development seemed to end in early 2005 but a new version made an appearance in April, 2008. There have been regular releases ever since. The latest version, CDLinux 0.9.2 was released on February 27.

"CDLinux is designed to be run as a live CD. A graphical installer supports installation to a USB stick or an existing Windows C: drive. The resulting installation is similar to a Damn Small Linux frugal install or a Knoppix poor man's install where the iso image is installed directly to the hard drive and is booted read-only. You are then effectively running the Live CD with the speed of a conventional hard drive. Installation to a conventional hard drive partition is minimally documented but it is a manual process as of the current release.

"For this review I used two systems:  my six month old Sylvania g Netbook Meso (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HDD) and my six and a half year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 (1 GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD). Both systems meet minimum requirements for any current Linux distribution and both have hardware which is challenging with some distributions. The Toshiba, in particular, uses a Trident CyberBlade XPi graphics chipset which is not VESA 2.0 compliant. A number of mini distros fail to configure X correctly on this system. Minimum system requirements for CDLinux are an i686 (Pentium Pro or better) processor and just 64MB of RAM."

Complete Story

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