As bootable Linux CDs go, Tao never really struck me as being all that different from other distributions that I have played with. Speaking for myself, I am either looking for a distro that is incredibly compact, can run on old machines, or that is bloated with insane hardware support…

Tao Live CD is a live CD based on rebuilt Red Hat Linux source RPMs. It features a useful selection of applications, has good hardware detection, and is even quick to boot. While I did run into a few problems, I found this a very worthwhile distro.

Tao and I got off to a good start. As it happened, the first day I saw Tao on DistroWatch one of my instructors at university expected us to bring in a SUSE live CD for our GNU/Linux course. I brought in the requisite SUSE CD, but I downloaded and used a Tao live CD instead. My fellow students started to complain about SUSE when I was already at the desktop and they were still only halfway through the loading screen.

Our next step in class was to write a quiz online in Flash. I found that Tao included the Flash plugin for Firefox, while the SUSE 9.1 live CD the instructor provided an ISO for did not, so everyone else had to reboot to Windows XP to write the quiz. [Read the rest]