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LAN Party Forums => Support Group => Started by: sully! on June 24, 2009, 04:16:59 PM
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Does anyone know of a Linux distro that can run as a Live CD and also includes Flash Player, i.e., don't have to install it separately, it's ready to run right from the CD boot.
(http://www.onflex.org/images/tux.png)
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I did some searching but everything came back with running it from a Flash drive. Sounds like you may have to build your own LiveCD and include that as a default package.
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That's what I was seeing too, even if I put "-usb" into the search query. I was hoping to avoid that, but looks like I might have to.
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You can try Super OS. It is an off shoot of Ubuntu with lots of additional programs mainstreamed into it including VLC, Flash, Skype, Wine, and Opera. It needs a DVD for the install and there is no mention of whether you can use the DVD as a live CD. You can create a live USB drive with it though.
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Hmm. Aren't most if not all linux distros now doing the live cd with the option to install?
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This would have to be a CD, not all the systems I'm looking to use this on (actually, none I believe) have a DVD drive. I'm trying to put together an Ultimate BootCD For Windows also (http://www.ubcd4win.com (http://www.ubcd4win.com)), but I keep getting errors when compiling it.
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Use a retail version of the XP cd, and turn off your virus protection. I know that is a no no but UBCD has some programs in it that virus scanners don't like. I tried doing UBCD with a Dell CD and I couldn't get it to work. I just downloaded a retail CD off of a torrent.
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I think that's what I'm running into, I'm using a Dell OEM CD as my source disc.
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So I've turned my focus to getting this UBCD4Win working, but I don't have any retail copies of XP accessible, they're all OEM or "Corporate" versions. Does anyone have a retail version of XP available that they could "loan" me so I can grab the correct files for UBCD4Win to build correctly? I keep getting errors during the build process and all indications are pointing to my use of the aforementioned OEM and/or corporate volume license versions of the XP install disc.
If you have it available, PM me and I can get you access to my FTP server to upload a RAR/ZIP/7z/whatever of the disc. I'm not sure if it has to be a bootable ISO image though, so maybe if you could capture an image of the disc before compressing it might work better.
Thanks.
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Try this. Only 580 megs so you should be able to download it in no time at all.
http://www.google.com (http://www.google.com)
Editor's Note:Original Link removed
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Link removed for ToS reasons, next time PM me like I asked. Thanks.
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back when i worked in the client infrastructure group at hershey, i built an imaging CD that they use today using WinPE with Windows 2003 server as the source kernel. This allows the image to boot completely into memory allowing you to remove the cd from the drive and the full image continues to run properly. Using XP as the kernel does not allow this and all the apps run off the CD (lots slower). The feature is optional and only useful if you know your target computers will have enough memory to support the whole image.
If you want, we can work on building a new one with whatever apps you want included.
The base Winpe is incredibly basic that boots to a cmd prompt window within an empty space. Included apps are notepad and whatnot. But I had one working with explorer, full networking, and random apps. However, the good news if you have full ntfs support to do whatever you want with local disks.
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The aim for this project is to extend the usable lifetime of some older laptops (4+ years) and/or allow a sandboxed environment that our technicians can use to troubleshoot connectivity in a customer's home without worry of picking up infection from the customer's equipment and carrying it back into our enterprise network. So there won't be a ton of memory in these systems and zero interaction with the hard drive is desired.
So the goal is to have something really with just a browser that they can launch and verify connectivity and (this is where the flash comes in) run some speedtests to verify connection speeds. The desire to have a Windows platform to do this vs. Linux is favorable so that John Q. Public can't claim that we're running some kind of special software that let's us get on the internet when they can't or that we've rigged the speedtest somehow (yes, those people exist, sadly).
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Hmm... the fact that you want a tech to go on-site, pop in a boot-able cd, and expect it to have nic drivers built-in is going to be very very tough.
At Hershey, we have a common desktop architecture where we have a finite # of hardware configurations. So, i was able to include the drivers needed for every hardware configuration in the CD.
To expect a CD to boot and be able to recognize and use the built-in nic of any random computer is going to be incredibly tough, if not impossible.
A thought would be to include drivers for a bunch of popular chipsets and nics, but to also have each tech carry a usb nic with them that you know the CD will be able to recognize and use.
You mentioned 'extend the lifetime of some older laptops' so that sounds like you might also want to run the cd on a work-laptop which would then have a known hardware configuration that you can plan for, with regards to drivers.
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If the laptop is older there is a good chance that Winxp or Linux would have the driver. I know with the 3 or 4 computers I have loaded Ubuntu onto the driver was already on the CD.
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MOBLIN!!! http://moblin.org/
Flash works out of the box... Limited driver support cause it's meant for netbooks, but I am also going to test gOS and MoonOS.
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Hmm... the fact that you want a tech to go on-site, pop in a boot-able cd, and expect it to have nic drivers built-in is going to be very very tough.
At Hershey, we have a common desktop architecture where we have a finite # of hardware configurations. So, i was able to include the drivers needed for every hardware configuration in the CD.
To expect a CD to boot and be able to recognize and use the built-in nic of any random computer is going to be incredibly tough, if not impossible.
A thought would be to include drivers for a bunch of popular chipsets and nics, but to also have each tech carry a usb nic with them that you know the CD will be able to recognize and use.
You mentioned 'extend the lifetime of some older laptops' so that sounds like you might also want to run the cd on a work-laptop which would then have a known hardware configuration that you can plan for, with regards to drivers.
No, these CD's would be going into Comcast owned laptops, not customer machines, so I can plan for which drivers to use. Most of these laptops would be Dell Latitude D610's, D600's, 131L's, or 120L's.
I was able to get the UBCD4Win compiled and working, it's just 714MB, so it won't fit onto a CD (I tested it with VMWare). I just have to go through the (long) list of apps that are included with UBCD4Win and eliminate some unnecessary ones to get it down below 700MB.
BTW, I found the instructions/files for including Flash into the build at http://www.bootcd.us/BartPE_Plugin_Details/126/Mozilla-Firefox-Flash-plugin.html in case anyone else needs to do this.
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cool. I just built a basic version of winpe bootable cd that i mentioned previously and the base iso is 148MB. I just need to add stuff to it.
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Success!!
All my prior efforts with winpe were with the older 1.x version which used the XP/win2k3 server kernels.
I just downloaded and used the new WAIK toolkit to create a new winpe 2.0 image. I've already included Opera in it with full flash support. As proof, I'm able to watch a youtube clip.
Did some digging, the difference between bartpe and winpe is that Bart basically did all the work himeself to create the 'PE' environment that will boot from a CD. MS used to provide WinPE only to Enterprise customers, but as of WinPE 2.0 (vista kernel based), they provided a free download for anyone to play with it.
One really nice feature included in winpe 2.0 is Ramdisk support. Winpe basically tricks anything that needs to write to the disk, and re-directs their write request to the ramdisk. The size is configurable and in my test image, i upped it to 64mb (didn't want it too big as the target may not have enough memory to handle it).
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As I am targeting older laptops, I wanted to stick to a WinXP based system for performance reasons.
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er? This is just the kernel. We aren't talking about the layers upon layers of crap running on top of the kernel that is installed in the normal Vista system. The thing doesn't even run explorer, nor does it have a start menu, or anything else.
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O RLY?
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sigh, never mind. Just trying to help out with a different avenue... you did post this in the 'support group' thread after all.
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That was an "O Rly?" in the vein of "Do tell more". If it's just the kernel, how does one launch apps, configure network settings (e.g., DHCP vs. static), etc? Do you have a link that I can explore more info about this method? Screenshots of a running system (via VMWare or VirtualPC)?
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I have the iso's that i've created from playing around with it. If you hope on AIM, i can transfer one to you.
Winpe is definitely not as easy as using bartpe as Bart has definitely put a lot of effort into the whole plugin support and making his product as easy to use as possible.
Basically, winpe is a stripped down version of Windows with only the bare components. The cd image boots to a floating cmd prompt window in a blank desktop. No icons, no taskbar, nothing, just the floating cmd prompt window. And you enter commands to load up normal apps like notepad, regedit, taskmgr, etc. Things that aren't included by default can easily be added
This is pretty bare bones, but it does have some nifty features that Bart might not. Because it is Vista-based, it have ip4 and ip6 support. It "supports driver injection, which enables you to load drivers either before or after Windows PE has launched". If "you start Windows PE and discover that it lacks a necessary driver, you can load the nonstandard driver from removable media and immediately use the hardware without rebooting." Useful when building the cd for the first time and trying to get everything to work right.
The only bad thing is the vista-based winpe 2.x needs 256mb of memory. You'll easily know why when you start looking at the source .wim file and it is 160MB all by itself and that it, by default, wants to create a virtual 32mb ramdisk as well. I tweaked my test virtupc machine to only have 128mb of ram and it errored-out when trying to boot winpe. "Ramdisk device creation failed due to insufficient memory."
Since the cmd prompt window that gets launched is essentially a type of autoexec.bat script, you can edit the script and make it load anything you want at boot. Write your own custom UI and have it launch. I haven't played with it yet, but supposed I can inject MHT support which would enable me to create a web-based application using only html code. If you've never used .mht files in the past, they are pretty powerful and would enable you to create a simple UI to launch apps. At least, from the documentation i've read, this should be supported, i haven't tried injecing the support yet. I can try it tonight.
Good article to see what it looks like and instructions on how to download and create a basic image. http://mattoid.com/data/computing/winpe_and_imagex.htm
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Thanks for the info. I PM'd you access info for my FTP server to get the ISO from you.