On 27 May 2010 17:47, Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berke...@gmail.com> wrote: > This Live CD sounds like an amazing box of tricks.
The Ubuntu Live CD has two main purposes. To allow new users to 'try' Ubuntu and see if they like what they see, and secondly to install Ubuntu onto a computer. A side benefit of it being a live environment is that you can use it for troubleshooting, diagnostics and problem resolution. It's a handy thing to have kicking around. Ubuntu didn't invent the concept of Live CDs, but certainly (along with Knoppix) helped to make it popular amongst mainstream Linux distributions. There are Live CDs and Live DVDs which contain even more utilities and tools. Indeed there are some which are designed to be run from a CD/DVD and not be installed at all. I recall visiting someone about 6 years ago who used a Knoppix live CD as his main desktop. He didn't actually have a fully installed system at all. > I shall have to run > it just for an exploratory session. Presumably I can just stick it in, > reboot, and see what happens. Thinking about it, it can't unmount the > internal hard disk completely, it must be using it, in its own way. > Stick it in, reboot and you may need to invoke the BIOS or some other boot menu to select the CD to boot from. Many computers ship with the hard disk being the default boot device, and need to be tweaked to boot from CD. Others have a menu which can be invoked with a single keypress at boot time, from which you can select the boot device. More recent devices can be booted not only from the internal hard disk and an optical drive but also from a USB device. As such you can (using special tools) copy a Live CD 'image' to a USB stick and boot from that. This can be quicker than booting from CD, and is more portable. It will auto mount partitions on the hard disk which are FAT/FAT32, but won't automount EXT2/3/4 or NTFS (I think) partitions. Cheers, Al. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
