Debian Live is getting better all the time
Nobody writes much about the Debian Live Project, which went from a bunch of stable images for Intel architectures to offering stable and testing images not just for i386 and amd64 but also for PowerPC, the latter in a time when many distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) have abandoned the Power architecture almost entirely.
Users of i386 and amd64 can also choose from monthly, weekly and daily builds of Debian Live with GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE or the standard install, and there's also a Web-based utility to build a custom Lenny, Squeeze or Sid image.
Aside from the usual ISO images, there are also .img files for USB drives (don't ask me exactly how to make us of them, because I haven't yet figured that out). There is a manual for Debian Live. It's pretty geeky, but I have a feeling I'll be able to drop a live, bootable image on a USB flash drive without taking the interim step of burning an ISO to a DVD-RW and using it to install Debian Live to the flash drive, which is the way I've been doing it until now.
I'm very much in favor of live CD/DVDs with which users can try out an operating system before committing to a full installation. This is what made Ubuntu into a giant, and I probably would have never run Fedora had I not been able to see how it worked in the live CD environment beforehand. I also use Jggimi's OpenBSD live images to put that OS through its paces before deciding on a full installation. And PC-BSD's failings on my current hardware (graphics suffering just as they do in Linux with the open-source ati/radeon driver) have made me leery of a FreeBSD install on the same laptop.
Until the Debian Live Project, there was no way to do this with Debian, the distribution upon which Ubuntu is based — and which can be better in many situations (including machines on which Ubuntu either won't install or doesn't run properly).
At this point, I'm testing Ubuntu 10.10 installed to a 4 GB USB flash drive, and every thing is working perfectly. I'd like to do the same thing with a daily build of Debian Squeeze, and one way (.img file copied to a USB drive) or the other (traditional ISO installation to the same USB drive) I will do just that.
While on the subject of my next distribution, I'm still running Fedora 13 x86_64 with Xfce. I've figured out just about every issue (sound and video now working well) except for headphone-jack muting of the speakers dying upon resume (as does NetworkManager, but I know how to get that service back up and running).
Since I've never made extensive use of suspend, this isn't a deal-breaker, but it's nice to know there's a distribution (Ubuntu 10.10) or two (can Debian Squeeze do this just as well?) that go ever further in hardware compatibility for my Lenovo G555 laptop (AMD Athlon dual-core 2.1 GHz CPU, ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD graphics, Conexant 5069 audio, 3 GB RAM).
Now that I definitively know how to make the graphics work (using the proprietary fglrx driver in post-kernel-mode-setting OSes) and speakers mute properly when headphones are plugged in (ALSA 1.0.23 is essential, as is the proper config line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf), I can recommend the often-$329 Lenovo G555 as a good cheap-laptop alternative for use with Linux. I can also recommend it for OpenBSD now that I know how to get the wired Ethernet port working.
Hopefully these hacky solutions for the Lenovo G555 will fade away in the near future as the Linux kernel, Xorg, ALSA and distro worlds figure out how to make this stuff work automatically; just the same, I bet the alc driver for FreeBSD and OpenBSD eventually works without tweaking the media settings on this Atheros AR8132 network interface.
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Thanks very much for this posting. I have an old PowerMac G3 on which I thought about installing Slackintosh. Given that Slackintosh seems to have gone into hibernation, I'm willing to try Debian Live on my old PowerMac.
The fact that Debian is adding functionality to PowerPC in the form of a live CD is a great development for PowerPC users.
I ran a Macintosh G4-466 with Debian Etch for quite awhile, and that was one of the better systems I've ever seen under Debian. It was way, way faster and auto-configured better than Fedora did at the time (and now Fedora doesn't officially support PowerPC anymore).
You don't get Flash video, but otherwise Linux is a great way to keep an older Mac in the game.
Definitely give Debian a try on the G3.
"You don't get Flash video"
Hmm. See "Lightspark will bring Flash support to Linux PPC users" - http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/07/lightspark-will-bring-flash-support-to-linux-ppc-users/
O.K. not Adobe but hey.
Re: Lightspark ... that's great. Maybe I should've kept my G4. I'm sure I'll run into a G5 at some point.
You're right, it's very easy to use Debian Live on a USB drive. I use a persistent install on a 4 GB pen drive as my main workhorse system and have been doing so for more than six months. It's much, much faster than Ubuntu and more flexible. The web builder gives you the chance to include the packages you need, and the already built ones are also very good. Incidentally if you uncheck the "debian installer" box in the web builder your image will be much smaller as it does not have to include all the package files in the image.
Here's how I do it:
1. If you want persistence of files etc. - I assume you do - partition your pen drive into at least two partitions and label the one you want to use for your data "live-rw" .
2. Make that one ext3 or ext4 and make the other one a FAT32 partition. It's most efficient to make the FAT partition just the size of the live CD since nothing else will go there.
3. Mount the iso file or the iso hybrid file after downloading it in any linux system.
4. Copy over all the directories and files from the mounted iso file to the FAT partition. Remember that "cp -a *" will not copy the hidden .disk directory - you will have to copy that separately, and without it the drive won't boot.
5. Easiest is to install grub on the flash drive and put this in your menu.lst (copied from mine, note that my FAT partition is the second one on the drive):
title Debian Squeeze Live KDE custom
root (hd0,1)
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 boot=live live-config persistent=nofiles quickreboot noautologin noxautologin utc=no nofastboot
initrd /live/initrd1.img
boot
You don't need many of those settings in the kernel line - the vital ones are "boot=live live-config" and, if you want persistence, "persistent". You can find out the meaning of these settings at the live-initramfs manpage.
6. If you don't want to use grub, you can rename the "isolinux" directory to "syslinux" and rename the "isolinux.cfg" file in that directory to "syslinux.cfg". You will then have to change any references in the cfg files in that directory to "isolinux" to "syslinux". Then install syslinux on that partition.
Either step 5 or step 6 works fine for me, and voila, you have a bootable USB drive running Debian live. Far more consistent, incidentally, than either Ubuntu or Mint, with which I had several problems when installing on USB drives.