Comparison of BSD Live CDs

With all that we hear on Linux bootable CDs, it’s good to know that the BSD crowd has not been forgotten.

GNU/Linux live CDs are increasingly playing an important role in the free software community. They serve as advocacy tools, they make it possible for newbies to try out software without having to install anything and they make fantastic rescue disks. While all the best known live CDs are GNU/Linux variants, there are also several *BSD live CDs out there. I decided to give them a test run.

I tested all the BSD live CDs I could get my hand on: FreeSBIE 1.1, FreeBSD LiveCD 1.2, Frenzy 0.3, AnonymOS 2006, OliveBSD 3.8 and NetBSD Live! 1.6 (editor’s note: a newer release of NetBSD Live!, version 3.99.7, is available from here). Each distro was tested on two desktops (a home-built AMD Duron 850MHz, 256MB RAM with generic components and a Hewlett-Packard Intel Celeron 500MHz, 256MB RAM) and two laptops (a Dell Inspiron 8200, Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz and 885MB RAM and a Quantex N30W, Intel Pentium 3 450MHz and 192MB RAM). I pre-tested all my computers for possible problems with a KANOTIX 2005-04 live CD before beginning my evaluations.

First, I wanted to see how these distributions would perform in terms of hardware recognition (in particular video configuration) and smooth installation, ease of use, documentation, speed and overall versatility (capability to dial-up, software choice, etc.). My second goal was to see whether these live CDs would be adequate advocacy tools for free software in general and for *BSD in particular.

FreeSBIE only booted properly on the home-built machine and the Quantex laptop. When it can successfully boot, FreeSBIE offers a great choice of applications on the XFce desktop (Fluxbox is also available), runs rather fast and comes with some good configuration scripts. On the down side, the documentation is minimal and the video configuration is less than stellar…. Source: DistroWatch

[tags]intel,hewlett-packard,bsd,comparison,live cds,celeron[/tags]