Because of these changes, the Mandriva of today is not the Mandrake of yesterday. The latest version of Mandriva (named 2010) is a modern take on the Linux distribution and in this article you are going to be treated to a walk through of the installation. NOTE: This installation will be done via VirtualBox, so some of the information you might see may or may not apply to your installation.

This installation will be accomplished with the help of the Live CD. You can download the Live CD from the Mandriva download page. You will notice, on that page, there are a number of different downloads. For this installation the download you want is the One 2010 download. Once you have downloaded that Live CD and burned it onto disk, put that disk in your target machine’s disk drive and reboot the machine.

Unlike most Live CDs, with the Mandriva Live CD you will have to answer some questions as well as agree to a EULA. This always takes me by surprise, but it’s a necessity if you want to boot up Mandriva. So agree to that EULA and boot up the Live distro.

Once you are up and running you will see the Install icon on the desktop. Double click that icon to begin the installation. And, of course, the first screen you will see is the inevitable “Welcome” screen. You can just click the Next button to actually begin the installation.

Figure 1

Partitioning

The first work you will have to take care of is the partitioning of your drive. Figure 1 shows the user-friendly configuration tool. With this tool you can either choose to use the free space (the easiest method), or you can create your own, custom partition configuration. As you can see (in Figure 1) this is being installed on a Virtual hard drive 16 Gigs in size. Since this space hasn’t been partitioned, it sees it as free space. So I will select the Free Space option and click the Next button.

Unused hardware support

Figure 2

This is a feature unique to the Mandriva installation. Once you have partitioned the hard drive the installation will compare the available hardware against the installable packages. Any packages that would not be used by the available hardware are not installed. This ensures your kernel will not be loading unused modules which will only slow down boot process, take up space, and use battery. Figure 2 shows the this screen. Just click Next and allow this process to happen. This will take some time (depending upon the speed of your hardware and the amount of packages that will not be installed).

Figure 3

Installation progress

After you hit the Next button you will immediately see the installation progress window (see Figure 3). Depending upon your hardware, this could take some time. Of course you will also be greeted by different information windows during this step. You will learn nothing new by watching…so grab yourself a soda or go play some WoW for a bit and come back when the installation progress reaches its goal.

Figure 4

Bootloader

After all of the packages have been installed you will have to deal with the bootloader installation. Your best bet is to stick with the defaults. If you load the bootloader on the wrong disk your installation will not boot.

As soon as you click the Next button you can then add, delete, or modify all of the entries in your boot menu. This is another section of the installation process that you should leave to the defaults. The only reason you would want to modify any of this information is if you are dual booting or you need to pass specific parameters to Grub for one of your entries. But more than likely, this step will be left to the defaults, so just click the Next button in this window as well.

The final installation window is the bookend for the Welcome screen – the Congratulation screen. This window will inform you to remove your Live CD and reboot your machine. Do this to complete the installation process.

Final steps

Figure 5

Of course you are not completely finished. Did you notice something missing from the installation process? No root password was created and no users were created. Both of these steps are taken care of post-installation. In fact, both configurations are taken care of in one screen (see Figure 5).

After you complete this step, click the Next button only to find yourself on one more screen. This final screen wants you to register with Mandriva, take a survey, and contribute to Mandriva. You can decline all of this if you like by scrolling down and clicking the Decline buton.

After you either decline or complete the various optional information you will finally get to log into your newly installed Mandriva 2010 Linux installation. congratulations, you are the proud user of an outstanding, user-friendly Linux box.

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The only drawback (if you can call it a drawback) is that customizations such as themes, fonts, colors, etc are not configured by default. As a backup, Remastersys will copy all personal data. As a Live CD, Remastersys will include all installed applications, but not personal data. In this tutorial you will learn how to install Remastersys and create a backup and a Live CD version of your currently installed Ubuntu desktop.

Installing Remastersys

The first thing you will need to do is open up your /etc/apt/sources.list file in a terminal window. You will need to do this using the sudo nano /etc/aptsources.list command. Once that file is open add the following to the end of the file (depending upon your release):

For Gutsy and Earlier add the following:

# Remastersys
deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository remastersys/

For Hardy and Newer add the following:
# Remastersys
deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository ubuntu/

Save that file and then issue the commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install remastersys

There will be some dependencies to install, so accept those and wait for the installation to complete.

Running remastersys

You will find the menu entry for Remastersys in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu. There you will see two entries: Remastersys Backup and Remastersys Grub Restore. The entry you want is Remastersys Backup. When you first start Remastersys you will get a warning that you must close all other windows as well as unmount any network shares. Naturally this makes for complicating the process of taking screenshots, but when using Linux – we have ways.

Figure 1

The main window of Remastersys is very simple (see Figure 1). You have a window with a number of options to select from. To create a Live CD click the “Make a Distributable copy to share with friends” and then click OK. To create a backup of your current running system (which will include all personal data) click “Backup Complete System” and click OK.

Let’s examine the process of creating a backup. You will want to make sure you have all windows, but Remastersys, closed. Select “Backup Complete System” and click OK. When you click OK the main window will disappear to be replaced by a terminal window. The rest of the process will occur within this terminal window. Depending on how large your system is, the creation of the .iso will take some time (and many CPU cycles). Do not do anything on your machine during this process.

Once the iso is created you will be informed the iso file can be found within /home/remastersys/remastersys. The file name will be custom.iso (unless you have changed the name by using the “Modify the remastersys config file” option before you create your backup or Live CD.

Once the process is complete you will need to burn your iso onto DVD. Most likely your backup will not fit on a CD. You can burn your ISO using the handy K3B tool (For a tutorial on burning ISOs with K3B check out my article, “Burn CD and DVD ISO images with K3B“.) After the DVD is burned you will have a perfect backup of your system, including configurations and personal data.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a nearly foolproof means of backing up your Ubuntu system, you have most likely found it. Remastersys is an outstanding tool that will create backups and Live CDs of your currently running system.

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The tool will setup Fedora on the USB stick giving the user the option to either select an already present Fedora distribution on the local computer system or to download one of the available Fedora distributions from the Internet. Available distributions include the latest Fedora 11 Beta, Fedora 10 and 9 as well as Sugar On A Stick. The Fedora 11, 10 and 9 editions can be installed as both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Sugar On A Stick has been designed to give children access to a computer system. The downloads can take a while depending on the connection speed of the local computer system and the selected Fedora distribution. Another interesting option is the allocation of persistent storage on the USB device which can later be used to store data on the USB device itself.

The tool will automatically detect connected USB devices that are suitable for installation. The Fedora Live USB Creator is available for both the Linux and Windows operating system. Jack posted an interesting article a while ago about Linux Live CDs that is a good read for users starting to discover Linux.

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What exactly is a Live CD? A Live CD is a CD (or flash drive) that contains a complete and bootable operating system that is run directly from the CD and not the hard drive. There are many types of Live CDs that serve different purposes. There are live distributions for repairing Windows or Linux systems (such as SystemRescueCD). There are live cds for nearly every Linux distribution that allow you to test and/or install the distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, ELive). You can even do stress testing and benchmarking with Live CDs like Inquisitor. Or what about a complete, embedded firewall distribution m0n0wall.

Why Use a Live CD?

The main purpose of a Live CD is to test drive Linux. A Live CD runs directly from the CD and the PCs RAM and does not even need a hard disk to run. Because of this, you can rest assure that a Live CD is not going to alter your hard disk unless you actually choose to install the Live CD onto your drive.

There are many reasons why a Live CD would be preferred. For instance, hardware diagnostics. I have employed Puppy Linux on numerous occassions in order to get information on a piece of hardware or test to see if a piece of hardware is working. I have also used that same Live distribution to run older machines where only certain functions are necessary. Live CDs are also great choices for cafes where you want to start with a clean slate every day. Another great use for a Live CD is when a machine has no mutable storage (a hard drive) and you want to run the computer as a pseudo “dumb terminal” or “thin client”. This would allow users to execute certain tasks so long as they didn’t need to save any work.

But what if you want to save information? For that you can use the flash drive-based Live distributions. With a large enough flash drive the user can also save data as well as run the operating system. If you’re looking for a pre-installed solution Mandriva has the Mandriva Flash Drive which has 6 gigs of free space for data.

One of the best reasons for using a Live distribution, in my opinion, is testing to see if that distribution works well with the hardware you have. I have one particular laptop that, when it comes time to upgrade operating systems, I wind up burning numerous distributions onto CD and running each one of them until one of them can work with the finicky hardware on that machine.

Drawbacks

One of the biggest drawbacks of using a Live CD is the speed. Remember, you are running this from RAM so the amount of RAM the machine has (as well as the speed of the CD drive) will determine how fast your Live CD distribution will run. So a machine with low RAM will run poorly. This isn’t such an issue if you are planning on installing immediately. But using the Live CD on a low-RAM machine will be painfully slow.

The other drawback was already mentioned, unless you are using a flash drive-based Live distribution, you can not save data. If you are only testing the distribution out to see if you like it, that’s not a problem.

Final Thoughts

Live CDs are here to stay. They have many uses and few drawbacks. If you are hesitant to use a Live CD because you don’t want to lose data, you shouldn’t worry about that (unless you accidentally click the installation button and accidentally click through all of the steps to install the operating system.)

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The operating system will only boot from CD which means that its data cannot be altered by malware or other forms of malicious software. It furthermore ignores local hard drives completely so that no data can be read or written to those storage devices.

A modified system kernel ensures that no network hardware can be activated which means that there is no possibility for connections to the Internet, local area network or other types of external connections. The only way to work with data is by using extended True-Crypt volumes which can be used to save system configurations and user data. (read working with extended True-Crypt volumes for additional information)

The Ubuntu Privacy Remix Live CD can be downloaded directly from the project’s homepage. The disk ISO image has a size of 688 Megabytes and has to be burned to CD after the download. A GnuPG signatur is available for verification.

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An alternative to burning Live CDs would be MobaLiveCD which is an application for Windows operating systems that emulates the process using Qemu. This essentially means that Windows users can run Linux live CDs in Windows without having to burn them to CD first and boot the computer from the CD afterwards.

This means it offers a quick way of testing a Live CD without having to boot the computer. It actually takes only two clicks to start a Linux live CD in Windows with Moba Live CD. This obviously requires a Live CD in ISO format on the computer. A good repository for Linux Live CDs is the LiveCD List.

The live CD is loaded in a window and the user can interact with that Linux distribution normally.

Emulation has the downside that running the Linux live CD in Windows cannot be used to determine hardware compatibility. Another problem is that emulation is always slower than booting from the live CD directly. Speed is probably the main concern for most users especially for those with older hardware. If a user keeps those two aspects in mind he should be able to get the full experience from Moba Live CD.

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Testdisk, which is a open source data recovery tool, might be the tool you need when you encounter a situation like the one described above. Testdisk will only help if the errors are software based, if you encounter a problem that is hardware based you are out of luck. Just download the version of Testdisk that is offered for your operating system and execute it. If you can’t boot the system you might want to use the gparted linux distribution instead which includes testdisk and can be booted from CD. (recommended)

Please note that you need to know what you are doing, you should have at least basic knowledge about partitions, file systems and the like to proceed using a tool like testdisk. You might erase data on other partitions otherwise. After selecting wether you would like to create a new log, append to an existing log or use no log you have to choose one of the hard drives that is currently connected to your computer.

You might want to disconnect other hard drives from your computer to avoid mistakes that could erase the data on that drives. Select a partition type afterwards, Intel/PC, Apple, None, Sun and Xbox.

After that you have many options – all of them are explained in great detail in the testdisk wiki. You may analyse the partition which displays partitions and searches for lost ones, write a test MBR, change the disk geometry, erase all data and access advanced filesystem utilities for Fat, NTFS and EXT2/EXT3 which leads to options to repair the partitions.

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The distribution is perfect for older computers, I don´t think lots of people are using computers that do not meet the minimum specs. Should run fine on every Pentium or AMD cpu with 16 or more ram. Has also the ability to run fully in ram, you only need 128 megs for this feature. Check it out, its worth a try.

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If you only use windows your choice number one would be to install a new copy and reinstall all your software probably. This is lots of work and might take some hours, hours that you might be able spare if you would have a linux live cd. A live cd is nothing more than a complete linux operating system on one cd or dvd disc. It won´t use your hard drives, which makes it ideal for lots of occasions. You have an important email that you want to send but windows won´t start or crashes immediatly ? You want to surf anonymously without leaving traces on your hard drives ?

I will give a brief overview of one liux live cd that i analysed , a complete list of more than 50 is available at FrozenTech’s LiveCD List

Kanotix:

The Kanotix cd comes with a lof of useful features, it supports IDE, SATA and Raid hard disks, supports Fat32 and NFTS, is able to perform system (hd, ram, file) and security tests, is able to partition drives and can reset windows passwords. It also comes with an office suit, email, browsing and the like.

Comes of course with a virus scanner, intrusion detection system, is able to restore data and can create images of hard disks.

And the best thing, you can simply download and burn it, and then try it out to see if you feel comfortable using it. You can even make backups before something happens to your windows system, pretty handy and recommended.

Technorati Tags: linux, live, cd, windows, security, rescue, password, reset, backup

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The rescue comes in form of a free linux live cd which boots from cd and normally does not change a thing on your hard drives. You will have lots of handy tools at your disposal, email, browser, word processing to name a few.

You can then finish your work using the linux tools and fix the windows problem later on (probably a reinstallation anyway). Simply download one of the free iso files mentionied in the article of help2go and burn it to a cd. Make sure you check it out before the first problem occurs.

Technorati Tags: linux, live, cd, windows, help, emergency

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