EXPLAIN: What is a Live CD?

Most modern computers have the ability to boot from their CDRom drive. This is typically how operating systems are installed (although many OSes come preinstalled these days).

You may have to change the boot order in your computer’s BIOS to make your CD bootable, but generally you will be able to boot from a bootable CD without doing so.

The GNU/Linux community took advantage of this trend in personal computing and have developed many different distributions of GNU/Linux that are meant to be run from such a bootable CDRom drive.

These distributions do not make any changes to the computer’s hard drive. This enables users to pop in one of these CDs and reboot their computer into GNU/Linux without worrying about losing any existing data or operating systems on the computer.

When the user is finished using GNU/Linux, simply popping the CD out and rebooting the computer will cause the computer to restart in the previous operating system (since the removal of the CD will cause the computer to reboot from the hard drive as per normal).

These CDs are called Live CDs because they require no installation and simply run ‘Live’.

According to Frozentech’s Live CD list, the two most popular Live CDs right now are SLAX and Kanotix, although Knoppix might be the best known Live CD.

Link to Frozentech’s list of Live CDs.