If you at all work with linux or are a system administrator, then by now you’ve at least heard of Live CD’s. These are a great concept. You can basicly carry around a working operating system in your pocket. Yeah, you might be able to pull if off with a mini HD or USB drive, but what computer these days doen’t have a cdrom drive. To top it off, lets see you drop that portable HD from one story high and see how well your drive boots 🙂
A lot of people use these CDROMS to: Test their hardware, play with linux without doing anything to their existing Windows system, perform forensics on dead computers, security auditing, etc.
This article goes over most of the Linux Live CDroms’ that try to provide a portable desktop environment. Basicly something you can, connect to the internet, listen to music, chat, write a paper, and print on. There are a number of interesting options avaliable and the author does a nice high level summery. Check it out.
This article is a quick roundup of “best picks” for Linux Live CD’s:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9569
[UPDATE]: I found this site that maintains a full list of linux based live cdroms: