On 5/11/2012 8:48 PM, Nick Holland wrote:
I suspect the interest in [an OpenBSD Live CD] is rapidly approaching zero. Its a concept who's time has come...and gone, I think. Five or six years ago, yeah...cool. Today...why?. A live CD gives you a very rigid, predefined read-only environment. I think a much more useful tool these days is a USB flash drive -- they are smaller than a CD, more rugged, and probably run on more modern systems than CDs do (I say that with some uncertainty -- some modern computers come with no DVD, virtually all come with USB ports, but some have broken BIOSs).
While I generally agree a USB-based installation of whatever OS you prefer is a great solution to many tasks, I don't feel this description of a modern live CD environment is completely accurate.
Before I went home on Friday, one of our not-production, local office machines needed some more room in its root filesystem so I booted into an Ubuntu live CD (11.04, I believe), manually brought up eth0, created and setup resolv.conf, apt-get installed lvm2 via network, and used the necessary tools to extend an LVM-based ext3 filesystem. Why did I do it that way? Because I had done it that way before without any problems, the CD was on the bench, the drive was available, it took about 20 minutes start to finish, and it effectively accomplished the task.
At no point did I have to jump through any hoops like remounting something read/write. It was simply a usable Linux environment. I'm sure it had limitations that I do not know about and did not run into, but, respectfully (and rhetorically), what about that is "pre-defined" and "rigid"?
To digress a little further, one day I was talking to our small-ish, local hardware vendor and he said he should charge to remove DVD drives from rack-mounted servers because he gets them back to have the drives put back in so often, and I wasn't sure if he was kidding or not. USB is great but, like you say, some BIOSes are broken and the death of the CD/DVD isn't upon us quite yet. I mean, look at OpenBSD's seemingly adamant support for floppy-based systems.
Anyway, I hope that perspective is useful in some way. I have no strong opinion on the usefulness of an OpenBSD live CD, and this isn't a Linux mailing list blah blah blah -- gotcha.
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