A Live distro for all seasons

[pinnerite]

I often need to boot on a live drive (DVD or flashdrive) in order to
work on my hard drives/SSDs unmounted.

Up to now I have used Parted Magic or Knoppix but I actually do not
really like either of them. Their only attraction is that they seem to
be able to boot on any 86 based architecture.

I wondered if Antix might be a better alternative.
Has anyone any experience in this area?

[Alan K.]

Post by pinnerite
I often need to boot on a live drive (DVD or flashdrive) in order to
work on my hard drives/SSDs unmounted.
Up to now I have used Parted Magic or Knoppix but I actually do not
really like either of them. Their only attraction is that they seem to
be able to boot on any 86 based architecture.
I wondered if Antix might be a better alternative.
Has anyone any experience in this area?

Have you tried puppy?
Of course it depends on what desktop you want too.
I have a gparted-live ISO.

I also just installed Linux Mint on a thumb drive. It's just another partition, so I can
keep it up to date easily forever. Only issue is that when the kernel is updated it
writes the efi partition and I have restore it back to reset everything. It takes less
time to restore (the few times I've had to) than to figure a way around it happening.

[stepore]

Post by pinnerite
Up to now I have used Parted Magic or Knoppix but I actually do not
really like either of them. <snip>

Why not? Explain.

Post by pinnerite
I wondered if Antix might be a better alternative.
Has anyone any experience in this area?

Experience with Antix or Live distros?

Man, you really don't give much do you.

Explain why you don't like those 2 distros.
Explain what you're looking for *exactly*.
Define specifically what you mean by *better* alternative.

[pinnerite]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:10:54 -0800

Post by stepore

Post by pinnerite
Up to now I have used Parted Magic or Knoppix but I actually do not
really like either of them. <snip>

Why not? Explain.

Post by pinnerite
I wondered if Antix might be a better alternative.
Has anyone any experience in this area?

Experience with Antix or Live distros?
Man, you really don't give much do you.
Explain why you don't like those 2 distros.
Explain what you're looking for *exactly*.
Define specifically what you mean by *better* alternative.

However, I mainly use a "live" device is when I want to clone a
partition ot a drive using dd.

I need to know for example if '/dev/sda5 is /home on the source drive
or the target drive.

If I need to clone an NVMe or M.2 drive, I want to identify it easily
rather than by a string of characters.

AND, while I am waiting for a long dd session to complete I would likw
to watch some video of my choice using Firefix or Chrome. Either way I
do not want to find that the versions used will not support iplayer,
UKTV ("U") etc.

Persistence would be helpful too.

In other words, not user-hostile.

Alan

[TJ]

Post by pinnerite
I often need to boot on a live drive (DVD or flashdrive) in order to
work on my hard drives/SSDs unmounted.
Up to now I have used Parted Magic or Knoppix but I actually do not
really like either of them. Their only attraction is that they seem to
be able to boot on any 86 based architecture.
I wondered if Antix might be a better alternative.
Has anyone any experience in this area?

The ssd failed on one of my laptops a few months ago, and had to be
replaced. I used a Mageia 9 Live Plasma flash drive to partition the new
drive with the included Gparted.

The Mageia Live isos will all boot on either legacy or UEFI systems. The
64-bit versions are available with Plasma, Gnome, or Xfce DEs, while the
32-bit version is only available with Xfce.

If you already have a Mageia system available, the best way to put the
iso onto a flash drive is to use Mageia's Isodumper. It was originally
created for the express purpose of creating Mageia flash drives. It's
the only thing I'll use for that.

TJ