Linux Mint Live CD

A while ago in a freeware thread, 8bit brought up Linux Mint.
I've always been interested in trying a Linux distribution, but don't want to chance screwing up the install on any of my machines. So instead I'd rather try running it off a CD, despite the slow performance I'm sure to encounter. It's just to mess around with for now, since I'd just like to try it.

Anything I should know really? I mean, I know it'd be kinda hard to screw up your computer by merely running Linux off a live CD, but I suppose there could still be things I don't know about. Any suggestions, or anything of that nature?

(I know I could run it off a flash drive as well, but I don't have a free one handy that's big enough at the moment, otherwise I would.)

only way to screw something up is if you open a partitioning program.

basically you have to TRY to do so.

Could be because I'm running it on an older, subpar computer, but man, people weren't kidding about taking performance hits on CDs.
I've been waiting for the thing to finish booting up for, like, seven minutes.

Well you could try dual booting. I done it with window xp and ubuntu linix in my old windows 98 computer. It didnt seemed to take that much of a performance hit even though I was dual booting in a small hard drive.

Man, every time I download Mint, the MD5 is something different. =/

EDIT: Yeah, I dunno, the MD5 never matches up with what it says it should be.

The file doesn't seem to be weird, but then again there's really no other way for me to tell. I used a download manager for Firefox called DownThemAll.

If anyone knows what might be up here, it'd be much appreciated.

I've never really used mint, but I usually use Fedora Linux, and its not too slow to boot from cd. There is another distribution called Puppy Linux that is actually made to boot from CD, and it will save a little file to your hard drive that contains all of your settings. A friend and I used Puppy Linux for high school papers during senior year on a P3 that didn't have a hard drive, and it seemed to run pretty fast.

Here is Puppy Linux

Here is the link for Fedora Linux

FYI it'd be WAY faster off a flash drive sometimes even exceeding harddrive performance

Originally Posted by nighthawkx

FYI it'd be WAY faster off a flash drive sometimes even exceeding harddrive performance

As stated in my first post, I am quite aware of this.
I actually just bought a small flash drive today to try it with, so I'll just try that instead when I have time.

Originally Posted by nighthawkx

only way to screw something up is if you open a partitioning program.

basically you have to TRY to do so.

This. The Live CD does not have access to your HDD unless you pretty much say HEY HEY, YOU, LIVE CD, DO STUFF TO MY HDD K THX.

Originally Posted by Tonchiki

Could be because I'm running it on an older, subpar computer, but man, people weren't kidding about taking performance hits on CDs.
I've been waiting for the thing to finish booting up for, like, seven minutes.

Well, the average read speed of an HDD is around 70 times that of a 9x, so you're going to notice a bit of disparity in performance.

May I suggest using Virtualbox to run a virtual machine from your Windows machine? This way, you have direct access to both OSs, you can save information to the HDD, you have many tools for managing your VM, and you will probably get better performance.

Originally Posted by 8bit

This. The Live CD does not have access to your HDD unless you pretty much say HEY HEY, YOU, LIVE CD, DO STUFF TO MY HDD K THX.

How does it do that? You must be magical to command CDs like that.

Well, the average read speed of an HDD is around 70 times that of a 9x, so you're going to notice a bit of disparity in performance.

I think it was mostly just a screwed-up download or burn, because it sat there with a black screen and a cursor for about twenty minutes before I gave up.

May I suggest using Virtualbox to run a virtual machine from your Windows machine? This way, you have direct access to both OSs, you can save information to the HDD, you have many tools for managing your VM, and you will probably get better performance.

I might think about that too, if I ever feel the need to use Linux more often. Right now I just want to mess around with it. (Besides, I'm using an old computer as a guinea pig, and it couldn't emulate a second OS on top of XP to save its life.)

Tonight I'm gonna try making a live flash drive instead, and see how that goes.

If you're gonna run Linux off a CD, just use Backtrack:
http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack_download.html

Oh my god, I ****ing love Virtual Box.
Fantastic.
(My older computer could only run Mint from a USB in compatability mode very very slowly, but I decided to just use VB on my laptop, the much newer computer, and works a treat so far.)

Originally Posted by Tonchiki

Oh my god, I ****ing love Virtual Box.
Fantastic.
(My older computer could only run Mint from a USB in compatability mode very very slowly, but I decided to just use VB on my laptop, the much newer computer, and works a treat so far.)

I knew you would.

I'm actually running VMs of Linux Mint 6 Fluxbox and Ubuntu 9.10 through Virtual Box, using Linux Mint 8 x64 as my host OS right now.

I'm kinda kicking myself right now though in that I wish I gave it a bigger "hard drive" to work with (I only gave it 3GB because I thought that'd be enough to mess around with, but I forgot about the programs that came in the pack). Can anyone give me a tip on how to add another VB hard drive to Linux (since I'm sure you can, I just have no idea how)? I know how to create another VB hard drive, I just have no idea how to make Linux have access to it. I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to partitions.

EDIT: Never mind-- it's a mess, but I figured it out.
Now I need to figure out how to connect to the Internet with it.