Beta Live CD for Debian 5.0

The Debian Live team has released the first beta of a series of live bootable images for the upcoming Debian 5.0, "Lenny". The images are available for CD, DVD, USB sticks, tarballs for PXE Netboot and a Squashfs image. The Squashfs image allows the live system to be booted directly from the internet or a local network where there is no network booting available, with the image carrying only a bootloader, the kernel and an initial ramdisk.

This is the first time that Debian has been available in a installation-free live version from the Debian developers; Knoppix, one of the oldest and more popular live systems is based on Debian. Live CD technology has improved over recent years and become a popular option amongst the established Linux distributions with Ubuntu, Open Suse, Fedora and Mandriva all offering Live CD versions.

The Debian images, which offer a taste of the forthcoming Debian 5.0, come in three variants, one for each major desktop environment, Gnome, KDE and XFCE. They are currently available for i386 and AMD64 based systems, with plans to add PowerPC and SPARC supporting images in the second beta due in a fortnight. Also planned for the second beta is the incorporation of the Debian live-installer, which allows a booted live image to be installed to hard disk. More details are available in the announcement.

(djwm)