Nowadays almost everybody knows about the existence of Linux. There is a very decent amount of people who use it as a primary or secondary OS; however the great majority of users are still not enough familiar with it. Though there are a lot of different reasons for that (most of them are subjective ones), we are not going to discuss them, because there is a plenty of information concerning that topic in the Web, so if you want to know what the advantages and disadvantages of using Linux or Windows are, you can easily find them out.

As far as the given review is concerned its intended audience includes the ones who would like to try Linux in order to form a personal opinion about it. Fortunately there is an extremely easy way to do so – Linux Live CD.

A Live CD (or DVD) represents a CD (or DVD) that contains a bootable operating system providing you a unique opportunity to run it as a usual fully functional OS without actually installing it. Generally all the live CDs include an installation utility so a user can easily install the system if he/she wants to; still before the user proceeds to an installation a live CD does not alter the operating system or files already installed on a computer’s hard drive. Thus it represents a kind of a “test drive” that helps you to see Linux in action with no risk of making a mistake, because as soon as a computer is rebooted it returns to its initial state.

Although being a “test drive” is a great feature of Linux Live CDs, it represents nothing but just one of the most important features which should be emphasized. The other purposes of using a Linux Live CD are:

  • Removing viruses
  • System recovery
  • Checking the compatibility of a particular hardware configuration
  • Making a drive image
  • Testing new versions of software
  • Providing a high-security environment for a guest and etc.

As you can see there are a lot of things you can do with that, so it’s a pretty multifunctional tool.

At this point we can go ahead with the most popular and easy-to-use Linux Live CD distributions, so you would be able to decide which one is the most convenient for you. Here is the list of the distributions we are going to talk about:

  1. Ubuntu 9.04
  2. OpenSUSE 11.1
  3. Fedora 11
  4. Linux Mint 7
  5. Knoppix ADRIANE 1.1
  6. Mandriva Linux One

Related posts:

  1. How to Install Linux from CD/DVD in Graphical Mode
  2. Choosing an Antivirus for Linux
  3. Best Linux Operating System for Laptop

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