News from the front

[Brian Kelsay]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> On Thursday, March 25, 2004 05:03 pm, Brian Densmore wrote:
> 
> 
>>Novell really needs to give credit to the Knoppix guy for
>>coming up with the LiveCD idea.

The list is long, but distinguished.

> Hardly.
> 
> RedHat's original distribution CD was bootable and would run "live".  They 
> later split "Live Linux" off to a separate CD around 5.2. I think the 
> earliest RH CD I have is the first one that wouldn't run "Live".
> 
> Recently (within the last 12 months) most of the major distros, starting I 
> think with Mandrake, started doing Live CD's as demos.  Whether this was 
> inspired by Knoppix and it's clones, or whether they are just a more 
> weed-like offshoot of the commercial demos I don't know, but they certainly 
> didn't invent it.
> 
> Mind you, they have gone a long way toward showing us what a "Live CD" can be 
> and do.

Your idea of a LiveCD and mine are a bit different apparently.  RedHat 
did give you a shell in a real Linux, true, but not the full desktop 
experience given by DemoLinux, Suse Live Eval and Knoppix.  I first 
heard of Demo and Suse Live in 2001, Knoppix in 2002.  The LUG gave away 
  DemoLinux in 2001 at the ITEC show, or was it 2002.  Knoppix really 
exploded in usability in early 2003 as did the off-shoots.  Gentoo has a 
LiveCD, but it also only gives shell.  If you read the thread, then you 
took the point that with Knoppix and friends you can have a full desktop 
operating environment, portable to nearly any machine.  I imagine if you 
use vi for all your editing, pine for email, lynx for browsing, some 
other text-based prog. for nntp, then yes, Red Hat had everyone beat 
years ago and should be revered for the gods of innovation that they 
are.  I had a set of floppies back in 98 that had more functionality 
though.  It was called MuLinux and it would run on most anything too, 
now on version 14.  You can thank Michele Andreoli, an Italian math 
teacher for that one.  Tom's Rootboot, Trinux and a few other boot 
floppies come to mind.  In 1999 the LNX-BBC from LinuxCare came out.  I 
still have one around somewhere.  It might be said that it was the first 
LiveCD with a desktop.

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