Mini DVD/CD Drives?!, Also linux live

[clessoulis]

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=57

I'm trying to find a drive like this but an interal one for mini dvd/cd burning perpose's.

I'm trying to make a really small personally pc for a friend as a gift who just wants to play neogeo games on his tv.

I'm looking for a linux live distro thats also really easy to use and lets you save configuration files to a usb drive or something to that effect.

Anyone have any help on this at all would be greatly appericated.

[funkyass]

The smallest retail case you can find will still take a standard 5.25 inch dvd burner, and they don't make anything smaller.

that being said, you can pretty much run linux off an usb drive /SD card if you really wanted to.

[doktor_kris]

I'm looking for a linux live distro thats also really easy to use and lets you save configuration files to a usb drive or something to that effect.

Linux Mint and DSL (Damn Small Linux) comes to mind.
DSL, as far as its name is concerned, is pretty darned small (~50MB).
Mint, on the other hand, is a kind of Ubuntu derivative which is
ridiculously easy to set up and stuff.

[paulguy]

Most optical drives nowadays have that smaller circle that's a bit lower in the tray. You put mini media in that.

[Kajuru]

Not as small as DSL, but Puppy linux is good to carry around and is very easy to setup.

[kick]

Not as small as DSL, but Puppy linux is good to carry around and is very easy to setup.

There are only 3 *good* live CDs: Knoppix,Puppy and DSL.

* DSL can fit into a business card disc (that's 1/4 the size of a mini-CD)
* Puppy can fit into a Mini-CD,but it won't use even a third of that space
* Knoppix is big and bulky,so it can only fit into a mini-DVD

* Both Puppy and DSL can boot from an USB flash drive and save to it.
* Both can load *completely* into RAM from mini-CD and you can free the CD drive afterwards.
* Knoppix is a much better live CD than anything *buntu (boots and runs 10x faster as a live CD compared to other bloatware live distros),but you can't eject the CD while it's running as you can do with the above two.

- Knoppix is the most powerful,but overly restrictive,bulky and a bitch to customize
- DSL (based on Knoppix) is great if you have a very low-end machine with less RAM than your pocket calculator :LOL: ,but it's bare-bones,so that makes it useless for emulation.
- Puppy is the one you want.It works great on both low and high-end systems,but to make it emulation-ready you'll need to get some additional packages via the package manager.

So,Knoppix is best left for diagnostics,programming,compiling,admin tasks and similar stuff. If you need very tight security in a Live CD,this is the one to get.

DSL is your best friend for very old junk PCs if all else fails.
It has a very old kernel and the most extensive driver support for ancient machines.Also very useful for rescuing data from junk PCs running ancient versions of Windows No bloat,but no meat either,just the bones.There's not even a firewall included !

A customized Puppy is perfect for emulation.
There are no separate users.It always runs as root,so you can do whatever you want to it without restrictions (that doesn't mean it's not secure though.The included firewall is set to a very high level by default)
Just add the ATI/NVIDIA drivers,some libs,all your emus and WINE for a complete experience.
It's also Slackware-compatible (not Slackware-based,it's built from scratch),so you can also fatten it with Slackware packages if you wish
There's even a Puppy compiz fusion package that flies with a POS GeForce2 MX

If for some reason you don't like Puppy Linux,you can also try SliTaz or a gentoo-based mini distro.

[Kajuru]

- DSL is great if you have a very low-end machine with a very low amount of RAM,but it's too bare-bones and useless for your purpose (emulation)

.
Bare-bones is the perfect word to describe DSL.

If for some reason you don't like Puppy Linux,you can also try a Slackware or Gentoo-based live distro (such as Wolvix Cub,Austrumi,etc.)

Puppy can run Slack packages, but, iirc, it's built from scratch. Also, you can just slap the devx/open office/others packages into the live-cd.