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Gentoo releases Live CD

Tags:
Linux,
Gentoo

Published: 10 Aug 2005 14:45 BST

Gentoo developers released a version of the Linux distribution that can be run directly from a CD on Tuesday, so that people can try the OS without installing it.

The Live CD contains most of the standard Gentoo packages including the GNOME desktop environment, the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite and the Firefox browser.

This is the first time that Gentoo has produced a fully functional Live CD — a "LiveCD" is already available on the Gentoo Web site, but this is primarily an installation CD.

Knoppix was one of the first projects to create a Linux Live CD, but there are now a number of Linux distributions that offer such CDs including community distributions such as Ubuntu, and commercial distributions such as SuSE Linux and Mandriva.

Chris Gianelloni, the operational manager for Gentoo's Release Engineering group, said in an interview last year that the Live CD will be produced for the Intel x86 and AMD64 platform, but ZDNet UK was only able to find an x86 version on the Gentoo mirror sites on Wednesday morning.

The files needed to create a Gentoo Live CD can be downloaded from the experimental folder on the Gentoo mirror sites.