One of the things I love about GNU/Linux is the existence of LiveCD's. A live CD or live DVD is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive.

Live CDs (and DVDs) are versatile tools, allowing you to boot into an operating system without installing anything to your hard drives. Let's take a closer look at the five most popular live CDs.

Live CDs let you boot an operating system without installing any software on a hard drive. The Ubuntu Customization Kit, tastefully called UCK, lets you add your favorite applications into the distro.

Mary, the daughter of a friend is in college: her Windows XP laptop constantly reboots and, we suspect, has a bad hard drive. The system will boot a live CD (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Desktop), and data on the hard drive can be read. During boot, the live CD identifies disk errors and tries unsuccessfully to repair them.

If you're new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Here we'll review several.

You're probably familiar with the live CD concept -- a fully functional operating system on a CD that can be run on any computer that boots from its optical drive, without affecting the one(s) already installed.

Live CDs do a great job of advertising Linux distributions. In addition to general-purpose live CD distributions, there are lots of task-oriented live CDs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could carry multiple live CDs on one DVD disc? Nautopia.net has put up a script that you can use to make a custom DVD to boot multiple live CDs.

Unfortunately, maintaining a multi-boot configuration like this can be a pain, especially if you later install an operating system which overwrites the GRUB boot loader you had in place (such as a version of Windows). If your boot loader is overwritten, you could be left with no choice but to boot the most recently installed OS.

"Zenwalk Live 5.0 is ready! Based on the 'Current' repository, the new Zenwalk Live features all the latest secure & stable versions of Zenwalk 5.0 standard packages. With this release, it is also our great pleasure to present Zen Installer which will enable you to install a standard Zenwalk system onto your computer's hard drive..."