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If you haven’t checked it out yet, Knoppix 7.3.0 is the latest release of this grand-daddy of Live DVDs. When it first started out in the late ’90s it was built to be both a Live CD to give you an instant free operating system full of free software that would run on almost any hardware you had available, and to be a Rescue Disc. By 2003, when version 3.2 came out, it had become a lot more, with many different specialized builds, including Scientific, Engineering, Game and Network platforms. A lot of folks also used it as a Demo Disc environment, making their own customized builds that would launch straight into their own programs, allowing you to run the software without having to install it on your computer. Over the years the functionality has grown, but the two core abilities that make it so very useful remain its Rescue Disc and its Disc Authoring tool kits.

You can download Knoppix 7.2.0 from one of the mirrors listed, using HTTP, FTP, or BitTorrent, and it is available in both CD or DVD size, depending on how extensive your software needs are. Note that the 650Meg Live CD version unpacks to 2Gig worth of software, so even the smaller file is a powerhouse. The latest version, 7.3.0, can be picked up included with the March copy of Linux Magazine.

The Live DVD build CAE Linux is a complete engineering toolkit for designing, simulating, testing, and creating/printing your own projects. Everything in the build is free and open source software, allowing you to design your device, do multiphysics simulations to optimize it, and generate the code for building it with 3D printing & milling. You can also design and develop your own printed circuit boards, and microcontroller circuits for automation. Not only do you not need to pay for a license for any of this (because of the GNU/Creative Commons licensing it comes with), you don’t even have to install it on your computer; it all runs directly off the DVD, being a Live Disc. This is pretty much the most powerful open source engineering package I know of, if you have any interest in the design and creation of anything from toy cars to advanced robotics, do yourself a favor and check out this build. You can find the download here, although I recommend visiting their home page to learn all about it and see what kind of support resources are also available.

Earlier this week the audio/video production powerhouse AV Linux released it’s newest version, 6.0.3. This is a minor update, mostly focused on fixing bugs and updating software packages to the latest and greatest stable versions, but they did make one non-trivial change; they changed the default kernel to the 3.10.27-PAE low-latency build. This gives improved performance for all aspects of media capture and processing, but especially for PCI audio devices or firewire interfaces. Performance on older platforms and hardware is also enhanced by this change. Whatever type of multimedia creation and processing you were thinking of doing, this Live DVD has all the resources you need for every aspect of the production workflow. You can download the Torrent or the Image and burn it to disk to get your own free toolkit. After you have booted it from the DVD and had a chance to see just how complete the software collection included in this OpSys is, you can also install it to your hard drive if you so desire.

It started out as a project to patch Android so you could run the open source operating system on netbooks and laggy tablets. They still have a long way to go before they have a run-anywhere version, but Release Candidate 1 of Android x86 shows some promise. With this build, you should be able to run Android on any computer, quite an improvement over having it stuck on your smart phone. Once they get the bugs out of it, it ought to be a lot of fun to be able to run all of those apps on your desktop.

The Musix Linux Live and Install build was originally built strictly for music creators of all kinds, but with the release this week of the stable version of Musix GNU+Linux 3.0 they have expanded out to include some graphics and video creation software. One of the strong points of this Distro is that everything included is completely free, with no proprietary programs or modules, so you do not need to pay any licensing or other fees for things you make with it. This live disk is Debien-based, so there is a huge world wide community constantly developing and debugging everything included.

This distribution was created primarily by the Spanish speaking computer aware musical community, headed up by Marcos Guglielmetti (or at least, he is the person doing their announcements these days, and his name is all over the disc; I have even fewer words of Spanish than I do of Japanese, so I don’t know more than that). Don’t let that put you off if Spanish is not your first language. They have done an excellent job of translating everything into English, as well as French, German, and several other European based languages. Their User Forums likewise support both English and Spanish to give you all the help, tips, and hints you could ever require with your projects.

When you boot from the DVD and the initial selection screen pops up, be sure to scroll to your two letter language indicator; it defaults to /es for Spanish, I went for /en for English, and so forth. If you have problems seeing it on your monitor, they have a VESA selection for the English selection to give you legacy hardware support, on some others it is identified as 800×600. Make sure you see “live” in the boot name so you run it directly from the DVD. Once it all finishes loading the log-in is “user” with the password “live”.

I should probably mention that this Distro used to be a geek-oriented package, requiring a Linux nerd to operate it. Things like knowing you had to launch the JACK server to give the various music programs a way to talk to the hardware meant you were doomed to failure without such an expert. They claim they have corrected that issue, and to a goodly extent they have (there are still some “gotcha’s” in the collection; us geeks have a hard time remembering which are the bits other folks don’t know about). Now, the JACK server launches on boot, and if you run something that conflicts with it, it gets shut down automatically.

The menu system launches Icons in the task bar at the top of the screen, and each time you pick one it gives you another set of icons on the screen to access a different set of programs. This visual interface structure gives you a way to access the basic core programs of this build organized by workflow, but does not give you access to the entire collection. If you prefer a smartphone this is perfect, it has that look and feel. In order to get past the icon interface and have access to the actual menu, select the calligraphy M at the left of the icon menu; it will give you the traditional drop-down Linux menu, complete with the usual organized sub-directories.

This particular build takes a unique approach to helping. They created the folder /home/user/demos/starters/ and packed it with .starter demos (yes, the dot indicates a file extension; Linux has a longer string than Windows for extension names). Use the File Browser to go to the folder, right click on the demo you want to check out, and open it with -> musixstarter. While the process may not be as mindless as doing the same kind of things in Windoze, the price tag will be a world smaller for the same capabilities, which seems like a fair trade off to me.

The last stable release for Musix came out in 2009, so the operating system it runs on and the various software packages themselves have both gone through some major improvements over the last half decade. But to me, what makes Musix special is the thought the developers have put into trying to make it the best one-stop solution for musicians/composers and recording artists/producers. While some of the included tools still require a bit more of a learning curve than some people may want to devote to the effort, the complete toolkit is a rival to anything else you will find online for these tasks, and often better at the same task for the price (did I mention it was free?).

Another excellent collection of creative software for the artist, animator, movie maker, musician, and publisher built into a Boot-From-DVD Live distro, Ubuntu Studio is ready to help you make some amazing stuff. While they don’t have the huge range of software Open Artist contains, what they do have still covers a lot of ground, and almost all of it is very powerful, stable, intuitive, and user friendly. There is a definite advantage in having access to tools you don’t need to go through a steep learning curve to get a useful result out of, after all.

The workflows they cover are audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing, and within each workflow they include an entire suite of tools for each step of the process. And while I dearly love the large selection of utilities in Open Artist, it can get a bit confusing at times when you just want to crank out your project. It is very nice to have a toolkit available where the best (or at least most commonly used) program for each step is at your fingertips, leaving you no ambiguity about what to launch as you go through creating your masterpiece, in whatever medium.

The latest release is built on Ubuntu 13.10 (Codename: Saucy Salamander), and it has all the latest and greatest updates for all the software. But because it is that new, and not fully vetted for the long haul, it is only supported for the next 4 months. Early adapters will want to go that way, but most folks will probably find the build layered onto Ubuntu 12.04 (Codename: Precise Pangolin), which is supported through 2017, a more reasonable way to go.

Any way you approach this software package, I suspect you will find it a very valuable addition to your creative arsenal. I certainly keep booting the disc over and over and use it to create new things, so I suspect you might find it as interesting after you have seen it a few times.