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Masters of the Distros -

I recently tried the Finnix live CD.

It is made for sys admins and is good in a few respects:

boots to command line - no gui
boots to user root
boots really fast
has 64-bit kernel
based on Knoppix

I do a dd to copy one hd to another. No problem. However when I try to shut down after this, I get a Segmentation Fault error. I've tried shutdown, halt, and init but they all give the same error. The only way to shut down is to hit the reset button.

Not sure if anyone else has had this kind of problem with a live distro. When I went to put a comment in the finnix forum ( http://www.finnix.org/forums/ ) it was down! It's been down for several days.

I've had a similar problem with the Knoppix 32-bit CD on a 64-bit machine. It hangs completely when shutting down.

Any comments are appreciated. Finnix is exactly what I'm looking for but I hate not shutting down gracefully! I've had trouble finding a good live CD for 64-bit machines that boots quickly to a command line.

Thanks for your great show. Best wishes especially to Dann.

Steve

This sounds nice, but is there really an advantage to using 64-bit in such a live CD? My understanding is that some programs run slower when compiled for a 64-bit environment, and that the only advantage is that you can go past the RAM barrier that 32-bit imposes, which is good, but I'm not experienced enough to figure out where this would be helpful in a live CD that boots to a command prompt, likely consuming very little memory. As it is, I imagine I would prefer a live CD that works on practically every x86 platform over one that gives a few benefits for some instances.

I know I'm not knowledgeable about these things, but this is the type of reading I see that makes me curious about the usefulness of 64 bit when applied to something like this live CD:
64 Bit and 32 bit applications

Hi Vogateer,

Thanks for the reply. I agree that there is not a huge speed difference with 64-bit. I mostly wanted a 64-bit boot live CD because the 32-bit will not shutdown completely. The only one that does is my live 64-bit Ubuntu Dapper, but that one takes a long time to boot and boots into X.

Finnix does backup faster than anything else I've tried by about 20% since there is less unnecessary junk in it.

I'm guessing that 99% of all live cds have boot options that allow you to boot to a command prompt.

I tried the slax live distro (slax.org) and it does just what I need - all the way to shutting down.

This is the only 32-bit live distro I have found that backs up and shuts down a 64-bit machine. Slackware comes through.