[wplug] live media recommendations and discussion

[Vance Kochenderfer]

I would guess that there's no single live CD out there that meets
all your requirements.  It's been my experience that certain
distros just work easier on certain hardware, and there's no good
way of predicting which.

A thought you might want to consider is creating a multi-boot DVD
or USB drive containing several different desktop-oriented live
CDs.  There's some documentation on how to do this at
<http://ultilex.linux-bg.org/the_dao_of_ultilex.html>, and you can
Google for various howtos on setting up GRUB on a USB drive to
multi-boot.

This way, if Fedora doesn't work on a particular machine, you can
just hit the reset switch and select Ubuntu, or Mint, or whatever
on the next boot.  This also has the advantage of potentially
giving the user a few different desktop environments to choose
from.  That way, he can pick whichever feels most comfortable.

To meet your requirements you'd have to pick the live CDs to use
carefully, but there are several which provide a full desktop
environment with useful applications and the ability to install to
hard disk <http://www.livecdlist.com/purpose/desktop>.

I've thought about creating such a multi-boot beast in the past,
but have never gotten around to doing it...

Vance Kochenderfer        |  "Get me out of these ropes and into a
vkochend at nyx.net          |   good belt of Scotch"    -Nick Danger