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498 Part III . Choosing and Installing a Linux Distribution Puppy Linux is still a relative newcomer to bootable Linuxes, but it seems to have a good following and fairly active forums and development effort. Tools for configuring your network and detecting devices seem to work better in KNOPPIX derivatives, such as Damn Small Linux, at the moment. But look for these areas to improve as Puppy Linux develops. Special Purpose Bootables As people begin learning about and playing with customizing bootable Linux distributions, I believe more special-purpose distributions will begin to emerge. The eMoviX2 distribution (part of the MoviX project) is an example of a distribution geared specifically toward a particular function (in that case, playing video content that you package yourself with the distribution). Here are examples: . Gaming distributions More than 100 open source games are included on the Linux Live Game Project (http://tuxgamers.altervista.org/ llgp.php) CD. In addition to games, the distribution offers other features of interest to gamers, such as NVIDIA video drivers, an applet for choosing random games, and music players. Another distribution focusing on games is the GamesKNOPPIX distribution (http://games-knoppix.unix-ag.uni-kl.de). While the current version fits on a CD (about 700MB), a new version expected out soon will fit on a DVD. Refer to Chapter 23 for descriptions of many open source games available today. . Windows applications distribution The SLAX project (www.slax.org) which is based on Slackware, offers some good examples of special-purpose bootable Linuxes. By including WINE, DOSBox, and QEMU software, along with an easy-to-use KDE interface, SLAX KillBill offers a special Linux system designed particularly to get Windows applications running in a bootable Linux. Figure 19-4 shows an example of the SLAX KillBill desktop with the Windows WINAMP application running under WINE. The SLAX KillBill CD image is included on the CD that comes with this book. Refer to Appendix A for information on copying and burning that image to CD. Using the features just mentioned, many Windows applications can run natively, without any modification. This distribution offers a great way to try different kinds of Windows compatibility and emulation software to see if you can move your application to Linux. On the CD-ROM Cross- Reference
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Chapter 19 . Running Bootable Linux Distributions 497 Puppy Linux The other heavyweight contender for lightweight Linux bootables is Puppy Linux (www.goosee.com/puppy). The Puppy Linux iso image is about 61MB. So, for example, you can install and boot Puppy Linux on a 128MB flash drive and still have another 60+MB of space left for data. Puppy Linux is built for speed, small size, and ease of use. To emphasize the easeof- use aspects, Puppy Linux tends to lean more toward open and easy than closed and secure. Here are some examples: . Writes to your hard disk Before you just start using Puppy Linux on someone else s computer, know that if it finds a hard disk when it boots up, it will mount that disk read/write and write a pup001 file to the root of the first usable partition it finds. It will then mount that partition on /mnt/home and leave it writable during your Puppy Linux session. Changes you make during your Puppy Linux session are stored in that pup001 file. So, for example, you don t need to enter keyboard, mouse, or video card information again when you boot from that machine. Most bootable Linux systems do not automatically write to a hard disk partition it finds. You should decide how secure you feel with that. . Loads to RAM When you load Puppy Linux it will, by default, run in RAM. So you should get excellent performance, provided your machine has at least 128MB of RAM available. With Puppy Linux in RAM, that also frees up your CD/DVD drive. So you can pop in a CD or DVD and play it without disturbing the running Puppy Linux system. . Sets no firewall rules Because Puppy Linux uses a Linux 2.4 kernel, the iptables firewall is built in. However, no firewall rules are set by default. So, if you are thinking of expanding Puppy Linux to offer some services (Web server, mail server, and so on), keep in mind that it is intended for a desktop system and not built to securely offer services. Every major category of desktop applications is represented in Puppy Linux. For word processing, you have abiword. You can play music with GPlayer and video with Gxine. Much of the Mozilla suite is included for Web browsing, mail, news, and HTML editing. For other Internet client applications, you have GAIM (instant messaging), Gftp (FTP client), and Sylpheed mail/news client, as well as remote login tools (secure shell and telnet). Other personal productivity tools that come with Puppy Linux include calendar (Xcalendar and Mozilla Calendar), spreadsheet (Planmaker), contacts (Gabby and Mozilla Addressbook), finance manager (Xfinans), and personal information (DidiWiki) applications. Most of these applications are lightweight, but serviceable, applications.
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496 Part III . Choosing and Installing a Linux Distribution Damn Small s default desktop is pretty simple. The window manager is the powerful, yet efficient, FluxBox window manager (based on BlackBox). Right-click the desktop to see a menu of features you can select. Here are a few things you want to do when you first boot up Damn Small: . Enhance your desktop Right-click to see the Damn Small menu, and then select Desktop.Full Enhanced Desktop. This adds some icons to your desktop to launch applications, some applets in the lower-right corner to display system information, and a workspace editor. Select Desktop again if you want to change the Styles (colors and window borders), or Configuration to change desktop behavior. . Get a network connection If you don t automatically get on the Internet at boot time, select System.Net Setup from the Damn Small menu. Then you can choose to configure your Ethernet card, DSL connection, dial-up modem, or wireless card. . Browse the Web Damn Small comes with the Dillo Web browser. Select Apps.Net.Dillo to start browsing. The browser is small, fast, and can run on any X window manager because it doesn t require GNOME libraries. . Configure and read e-mail The Sylpheed e-mail client is also very compact and runs fast. Select Apps.Net.Sylpheed to open it. Configure it and you can be up and reading your e-mail within a few minutes. . Try out other applications Right-click and look through the menu for applications that interest you. To see descriptions of those applications, visit http://damnsmalllinux.org/applications.html. . Get other applications Select the MyDSL icon on the desktop to see a selection of application categories you can choose from. If you are connected to the Internet, you can see lists of applications in each category to choose for downloading and installing. You can get other DSL files that will let you download other applications from your desktop as well. Visit www.damnsmalllinux.org and select the link to packages to see the myDSL repository. Damn Small Linux has recently added some excellent customization features. For example, packages you download, desktop settings, and configuration information can be saved across reboots. By creating a list of files and packages and files you want to save, those files and packages can be saved to a backup file that is stored on your hard disk or any removable medium. The next time you reboot, you can tell Damn Small Linux where to find that backup file and all settings and applications will be inserted into your current Damn Small Linux session. More information about using Damn Small Linux is available at the project FAQ page, www.damnsmall.org/faq.html. Note
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Chapter 19 . Running Bootable Linux Distributions 495 BBC project to hand out to represent their groups. Many bootable Linux distributions for media having capacity that is larger than that of a business-card-size CD tend to be based on KNOPPIX. Two examples of tiny desktop Linux distributions are Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux. Damn Small Linux If you want your desktop Linux distribution to fit in your wallet, Damn Small Linux is one of your best choices. Damn Small is one of the first distributions based on KNOPPIX to fit on a bootable business card (about 48MB currently). Damn Small Linux is included on the CD that comes with this book. You can copy it and burn it to CD as described in Appendix A. With KNOPPIX inside, you have many of the features you get with KNOPPIX: excellent hardware detection and bootup to a desktop with network connectivity (provided you have an Ethernet connection with DHCP). Many features specific to Damn Small, however, are there to let you get a workable desktop system in a small medium (mini-CD) and low RAM. Figure 19-3 shows an example of the DSL desktop. Figure 19-3: Damn Small Linux fits a lot of features in under 50MB. On the CD-ROM
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494 Part III . Choosing and Installing a Linux Distribution KnoppMyth I ve added KnoppMyth here because it represents a new and interesting class of bootable Linux distributions. MythTV is a fairly complex set of software used to configure an entertainment center that can include a personal video recorder (complete with downloaded local TV listing and tools for managing recording and playback), music player, weather center, and tools for getting news and other information. KnoppMyth is a CD distribution based on KNOPPIX that is intended to help simplify getting a MythTV installation up and running. Boot up KnoppMyth, answer a few questions, and MythTV is installed on your hard disk. KnoppMyth also includes another nice feature: a MythTV front end. With MythTV configured on a computer on your LAN, you can use the KnoppMyth disk to boot up a MythTV front end. That way you can use your MythTV entertainment center from any TV on your local area network. Dyne:bolic The Dyne:bolic GNU/Linux live bootable CD (www.dynebolic.org) provides a full range of multimedia production tools on a single bootable operating system. The distribution is intended for artisans who want to create and work with a variety of digital media: audio, video, digital images, HTML, and so on. Tools included with Dyne:bolic include MuSE, TerminatorX, GDam, SoundTracker and PD (for mixing and streaming audio). Video editors include Kino, Cinelerra and LiVES. For 3D modeling, there is Blender. For image manipulation, Dyne;bolic includes GIMP. Bluefish is included for creating Web pages. Tiny Desktops A small CD, shaped in the form of a business card, can fit in your wallet. A USB pen drive can hang from your keychain. There are whole bootable Linux distributions that let you boot up a desktop with which you can connect to the Internet, browse the Web, play music, send and receive e-mail, do instant messaging, write documents, and work with spreadsheets. And they can do all that in about 50MB of space on a removable medium. CD business cards are really just regular CDs that have been cut into the shape of a business card. Depending on the one you choose, it can hold from 40MB to 52MB of data. A mini-CD can hold about 180MB of data. You can purchase these CDs in bulk from many locations that sell regular CDs, and you can play them in any CD drive. (However, it s best to use these CDs in trays that have a mini-CD inset because they have been known to fly loose and break CD drives.) Many bootable Linuxes these days are either based on KNOPPIX or the Bootable Business Card project (www.lnx-bbc.org). I know of several Linux Users Groups that have tailored their own bootable business card projects from the lnx-bbc.org Note
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Chapter 19 . Running Bootable Linux Distributions 493 . Network MoviX2 boots onto the network if a DHCP server is detected. Although the friendly user interface doesn t appear to support it yet, software in MoviX2 should enable you to get content from your LAN or the Internet to play back using an NFS (UNIX file sharing) or FTP (standard Internet file sharing facility) file server. MoviX2 boots right up to MPlayer, so you can eject the MoviX2 disk, insert a CD, DVD, or VCD into your drive and play any supported content. Right-click the desktop to see your choices for selecting content. If you are comfortable moving around in Linux, you can go to different virtual terminals while you are using MoviX2. Press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to view a sound mixer or Ctrl+Alt+F3 to go to a Linux shell. Then press Ctrl+Alt+F4 to get back to the main screen (with MPlayer). Select Switch to MoviX2 from the menu, and you can choose to run your audio player, slide show, or TV viewer (the latter if you have a television card installed). If you think MoviX2 is cool, you ll really like the idea of the eMoviX project. With eMoviX, you put a mini-MoviX2 distribution on a CD or DVD with your video, so that your video content comes with its own bootable player! (See http://movix .sourceforge.net/Docs/eMoviX for details.) At the time of this writing, MoviX2 had recently reached release 1.0. That implies that it has reached a fairly stable form. While there are still some rough edges to it, MoviX2 is fun to play with. Both eMovix and MoviX2 are described in the book Linux Toys II by Christopher Negus, in a project devoted mainly to creating your own bootable movies. GeeXboX GeeXboX (www.geexbox.org) is another bootable multimedia player distribution. From the screen that appears after GeeXboX boots, you can use your cursor to select the location of the content you want to choose. Like MoviX, you can play a variety of audio and video content. It also boots up on your network, so you can get audio and video content from it. Because GeeXboX is so small (just a few megabytes), you can fit it easily on a mini- CD, bootable business card, or even a pen drive (provided your computer can be booted from those media). There is no graphical interface; you just use the keyboard to select content and simple controls from menus. Use arrow keys to move among the few GeeXboX selections (Open, Controls, Options, Help, and Quit). Press Enter to make a selection. You can open a file from hard disk, a music playlist, directory of images, or removable media (DVD, VCD/XCD, or audio CD) containing video content. Press M to show or hide menus and use P to pause. Note
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492 Part III . Choosing and Installing a Linux Distribution Multimedia Bootables Some bootable Linuxes are tailored specifically to let you play movies, music, and images. Most let you play whatever content you have on your hard disk or can point to from the Internet. Many run in a small enough amount of memory to let you remove the bootable DVD or CD containing Linux and insert your own content (such as a music CD or movie DVD) to play. MoviX2 With MoviX2 (http://movix.sourceforge.net), you run a multimedia player that disregards the operating systems (Windows, Linux, or otherwise) installed on your system. Because MoviX2 is small enough to run in your system memory, after it has booted you can remove it and insert the CD or DVD containing the content you want to run. With MoviX2, you can play: . Videos You can play video from many different formats, including DivX/XVID, MPEG 1 and 2, and MPEG 4. So that MoviX2 can be freely distributed, it does not include the capability to play most DVD movies. The libdvdcss library, needed to decrypt DVD movies (even if only for playback), has been the subject of legal suits. Although this library is available on the Internet, no legitimate Linux systems in the U.S. distribute this library, and using it may be illegal. You should research this issue yourself if you plan to add libdvdcss to MoviX2 or any other Linux distribution that includes MPlayer or xine media players. . Music Audio files in AVI, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and other formats can be played. . Images You can run a slide show using the Linux Frame Buffer Image (fbi) viewer that displays images in JPEG, PNG, and a variety of other image formats. The MoviX2 player itself doesn t include any video, music, or images for you to play. Instead, it lets you choose the location of your content. Here are the possibilities, depending on what is available from your computer: . DVDs If you have a DVD drive on your computer, you can play supported content from there. (As previously stated, that doesn t include most commercial movies, by default.) . VCDs and SVCD These are video formats that can be put on standard CDs. . Audio CDs Standard music CDs (including AVI, MP3, and other formats) can be played. . Hard disk files Any supported content on the local hard disk can also be played from MoviX2. Like KNOPPIX, MoviX2 detects hard disk partitions and then mounts them as you request files from those partitions. The mounts are done read-only, by default, so you can play your content without any risk of deleting or otherwise damaging it. Caution
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Chapter 19 . Running Bootable Linux Distributions 491 on a bootable business card (about 50MB). Check it out at www.freshmeat.net/ projects/INSERT/. The INSERT CD image is included on the CD that comes with this book. Refer to Appendix A for information on copying and burning INSERT to CD. The Fluxbox window manager offers some docked system monitors for monitoring CPU, network traffic, memory and swap use, and battery (if you are on a laptop). Another applet displays the Matrix screensaver (double-click it to launch a Terminal window). The mount applet lets you step through the CD, floppy, and hard disk partitions on your computer. Click the key button on that applet (so it turns green), and you can double-click it to mount and open that device or partition. Right-click the desktop to see a menu that lets you select from a handful of graphical tools for troubleshooting your computer and network, most of which will run from the shell. Figure 19-2 shows the INSERT desktop. Figure 19-2: Use INSERT to troubleshoot computers and networks. You can find what s in INSERT from the List of Applications page on the Inside Security site (www.inside-security.de/applicationlist.html). On the CD-ROM
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490 Part III . Choosing and Installing a Linux Distribution . Logical Volume Management tools For file systems created with LVM, there are lvm and evms tools. (Logical volume management lets you add space to areas of a file system without changing the physical partitions.) . Security tools Check whether the data on your system has been compromised with tools such as chkrootkit (to check for software installed by hackers to let them access your system), as well as clamav and clamd (to scan for existing and incoming viruses). Use nmap (scan network computers for open ports) and nc (the Netcat utility for checking connections to remote hosts) for checking network security. . Backup tools As you might expect, this distribution contains standard Linux tools for archiving data (tar, cpio, dump, rar, and so on) and compressing data (such as bzip2, gzip, and compress). Likewise, it contains standard tools for copying your data over the network (scp, sftp, ftp, and so on). Because System Rescue CD doesn t include a graphical interface, it can get a lot of commands into about 100MB of disk space. Some of the tools however, such as the midnight commander (mc command) file manager, provide a GUI-like interface from a regular Linux shell via the ncurses libraries. The System Rescue CD image is included on the CD that comes with this book. Refer to Appendix A for information on copying and burning the System Rescue CD image to CD. KNOPPIX Security Tools Distribution The Knoppix-STD goes lightweight on the window manager to go heavyweight on the diagnostic tools. The distribution contains hundreds of tools that can be used for repairing and assessing computer and network security (see http://knoppixstd. org). Instead of a full GNOME desktop, Knoppix-STD uses the Fluxbox window manager. It will run on lesser machines, but you ll get a usable GUI on almost any Pentium-class machine with at least 64MB of RAM. With at least 640MB of RAM, you can run the entire distribution from RAM (type knoppix toram to boot it to run entirely from RAM). With Knoppix-STD running in RAM, the system operates faster and your CD or DVD drive is available for other purposes. Go to the project s Tools page (www.knoppix-std.org/tools.html) to find out about more features in the project. Or go to the download page (www.knoppixstd. org/download.html) to download and try it yourself. The Inside Security Rescue Toolkit INSERT (Inside Security Rescue Toolkit) is another KNOPPIX derivative that includes features from Damn Small Linux as well. INSERT bills itself as a disaster recovery and network analysis system. It contains a more compact set of tools to fit On the CD-ROM
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Chapter 19 . Running Bootable Linux Distributions 489 . Managing a firewall Bring a firewall up quickly or assess what s happening on a running firewall. The blockall script can block all inbound TCP traffic, flushall flushes your firewall rules, and fwlogwatch can monitor firewall logs. The firestarter and floppyfw utilities offer quick ways to start up a firewall. Tools for managing iptables firewalls include gtk-iptables and shorewall. Popular Linux rescue CDs that illustrate very well how many tools you can get on a single CD include System Rescue CD, Auditor Security Collection, Knoppix-STD and the Inside Security Rescue Toolkit (INSERT) rescue CDs. When you use a rescue CD to change a master boot record, fix partition tables, or clean viruses from a system, you risk doing irreparable damage to your computer system. Remember that GPL software comes with no warranty, so you use that software at your own risk. Auditor Security Collection A wide-range of powerful, well-organized security tools are on the Auditor Security Collection LiveCD (http://new.remote-exploit.org/index.php/Main_Page). Auditor is based on KNOPPIX, so the boot process and basic desktop environment (KDE, by default) will be familiar if you have used KNOPPIX before. Auditor offers a good combination of GUI and command-line security tools. The Auditor menus (shown in Figure 19-1) organize all of those tools together. This lets you look in one place for all similar tools. When you select a command from a menu, the command runs with the help (-h) option so you can see how it works. It s up to you to then type the command and add the options you want. Figure 19-1: Auditor organizes graphical and command-line security tools. System Rescue CD The System Rescue CD (www.sysresccd.org) is aimed squarely at recovering crashed systems. Tools included on this distribution include those specifically for repairing and saving your data, such as: . Disk partitioning tools You can check, add, remove, move, and resize disk partitions with tools such as parted and qtparted. Caution
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