The joys of the livecd.

Of late my laptop has developed a lovely habit of eating its hard disk. Its first one lasted for about 8 months, but the replacement managed the staggering achievement of running for about 2 months, one of which I was on holiday for, so its only 1 month. 1 month, thank somebody up above for warranties.
Because of this I have been stuck with the choice of a live cd or my older laptop which hums away to itself in the corner storing and serving all of my data.

Now while this seems like a no brainer, I thought I would take the time to commend Mandriva on creating a very powerful live cd. Especially as One has of late become more of a way to install rather than run a live system off the cd.

The boot up was rather slow but that is expected, however, once you have the desktop up and running it is another story, I quite often don't notice any performance difference. I haven't even been sticking to the standard programs either, I have been working with both spreadsheets and the word processor in Open Office, editing lots of large images in GIMP, doing some modelling in QCAD, stitching panorama's with Hugin and seeding 15Gb of torrents.
The best bit of this is that a QCAD, Hugin and Ktorrent have to be installed from the huge source of software that is the Mandriva repo. Which can either be setup through easyurpmi or by using the Mandriva package manager, rpmdrake and following the instructions that pop up. More at the Mandriva Wiki.

Because one is a mix of both free and freely distributable non-free software (flash, nvidia driver, etc.) you get a very nice system straight up, so faffying around to get the display to work, or having gnash fail at playing a flash video shouldn't be a problem. The only thing that I found was missing was Java, however, when you look at the space it would need it makes perfect sense. Also missing was a CD burning suite, such as K3B, but concidering that this is a live system, it is not needed. The popular programmes that you would expect are here: Amarok, Okular, Korganiser, KAddressBook and Kmail. Also included is Totem player, although this does seem a little out of place, it integrates with the codeina framework to provide all of the codecs that you need to play your media. (software repo setup is needed for this) Totem is used because the gstreamer backends for the KDE4 players aren't stable enough. Although this system does work very well, I always just choose to install kaffeine4 from the repo or whatever other media player you choose.

The hardware detection is very good too, I had my printer setup for me by just plugging it in, all the software was installed for me(once the repo was set up). If you do end up with an issue, the wonderful Mandriva Control Centre (MCC) will put it right, it contains tools for setting up the graphics card, the sounds card, a partition wizard, printer set up, backup, parental controls; user and service management; UPS, keyboard and mouse setup; network setup which will handle nearly all wireless NICS including Broadcom with a detailed walkthrough, SAMBA,NFS and Webdav setup and firewall, security and permissions setup,

Now we come to the desktop, I am using the 2009.1 KDE4 version of One, although the background and theme are not to much to my liking, they do look professional and are nicely understated and don't jump at your face. The Desktop keeps all of the functionality and eye candy that you can put on the installed version, the desktop effects, and all the configuration that is present on the installed system is there on the live one.

So far, I have had the system running for around 36 hours, and nothing has crashed or even hinted that it might have a problem with anything. The system is currently using 650Mb of RAM with firefox running with 10 tabs open, including last.fm, facebook and picasia all of the others have rich content on them. Gwenview is also running with some big panoramas loaded, as well as Dolphin, Ktorrent and Amarok. Starting GIMP only adds a further 10Mb to the memory usage.
So I wouldn't want to run this system and push it as far as I am on anything with less than 1Gb of RAM, but you could very easily run the system on 512Mb without to much of a problem.

So to conclude, you get a complete and very reliable system that is very expendable on one cd that will run an your computer when the worst happens to your hard disk.
(It can also be installed to the hard disk if you are lucky enough to still have one that works)

The aim of this thingy thing.

Hopefully I will expand this to cover the new climbing routes I put up, the various bits of my boat that I break and the amusing things that seem to happen when I sail, the strange and sometimes wonderful bits of scrap that I join together to hopefully make something useful. I also hope that I can find the time to restart writing about some of the packages backported in Mandriva as they are quite often very useful.
As well as trying to keep track of the major and some of the minor changes in cooker and its current installable state.

The most recent addition to the host of things that we take on holiday, the Wind Buggy (above) or Wind Power Death Mk. 2 (The first one did almost kill me) as it has become known, is currently being rebuilt and redesigned, so I will keep track of this and post the speeds that I have hit in it, current 47mph in the above picture.