One of the things I love about GNU/Linux is the existence of LiveCD's. A live CD or live DVD is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive.

This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with CloneZilla Live. CloneZilla Live is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost.

Live CDs let you boot an operating system without installing any software on a hard drive. The Ubuntu Customization Kit, tastefully called UCK, lets you add your favorite applications into the distro.

Live CDs do a great job of advertising Linux distributions. In addition to general-purpose live CD distributions, there are lots of task-oriented live CDs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could carry multiple live CDs on one DVD disc? Nautopia.net has put up a script that you can use to make a custom DVD to boot multiple live CDs.

A live cd is an operating system and the programs on it you can boot from the cd/dvd drive. [here's a list of this blogger's favorites]

If you're new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Here we'll review several.

Mary, the daughter of a friend is in college: her Windows XP laptop constantly reboots and, we suspect, has a bad hard drive. The system will boot a live CD (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Desktop), and data on the hard drive can be read. During boot, the live CD identifies disk errors and tries unsuccessfully to repair them.

* Create a tuned server appliance, containing your application and just enough operating system components
* Spin a live CD or DVD with just the packages and software you need
* Create a ready-to-run VMware or Xen virtual server appliance

* Create a live USB key and carry your Linux system with you wherever you go
* Build a hard disk image for preloading onto hardware

Everybody likes benchmarks. One way to address these inconveniences is to use PTS Desktop Live, a live CD built on Ubuntu containing the test suite which removes any operating system or software requirements for the target machine.