MandrakeMove and other 'run from cd' distros-opinions?

[gearjunkie]

I am signed up for the mandrake newsletter and the latest few have included a new product from them about 'MandrakeMove'. This is supposed to be a lightweight, but still full-featured version of Mandrake that will run off a CD. The concept is that you can store all your personal information and any files you might use on a USB thumb drive. That way you can take linux with you wherever you go.

I was thinking about trying this out, since when I'm at school (and not on winter break) I do a lot of computing on campus. The reason I would use this the most is so that I can ssh into my machine at home, and forward the x-windows to the machine I'm running MandrakeMove on. I would think this would be pretty handy for something like this.

However, I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this version of the mandrake distro, or any of the 'run from cd' distros (knoppix, I think is another one, I dunno, I've never used it..). I'm wondering how 'universal' they really are as far as running on a variety of machines, and how useful they may be for something more than just a 'I want to get my feet wet in linux but don't want to install yet'.

Just on a side note, wouldn't it be cool if there was an easy way to create a distro that would fit on a CD that was customized to your taste. Like I could download something that would let me say:
Okay, I want a distro that will fit on a CD and have enlightenment as the WM (or fluxbox, or whatever), have mozilla as the web browser, have these games, this office suite, and these other programs on it. Then there would be some automated script or something that would put all of them together, and create an ISO for you to burn to a CD.
Now that would be slick.

Hell, maybe it isn't really all that hard to do it yourself? I dunno, I've never really made a distro before.

Any comments on any of the above ramblings?
-Nathan

[DerekKraan]

Of course you need to have a CD-ROM drive that is bootable on the computer you are inserting the disc to. At my school you aren't allowed access to the BIOS, and the CD-ROMs aren't bootable. No luck there.

[rbrimhall]

http://www.mepis.org/

This is an excellent distro run from cd and hdd... there is a method to format and sync a usb thumb drive. It's a pretty smooth distro IMHO.

[hard candy]

Mepis is great. And Dynabolic (http://dynebolic.org/) is the coolest of all distros- can run on a Xbox, set up a streaming internet radio station, and can be used in an OpenMosix clustered computing environment.
Dynabolic FAQ (http://lab.dyne.org/DynebolicFaq)

[twilli227]

quote:
Just on a side note, wouldn't it be cool if there was an easy way to create a distro that would fit on a CD that was customized to your taste.

You mean like this:
http://www.slackware-live.org/
There are instruction on how to make your own.

Here are a few more live-distros:
http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Just an FYI: If you're planning on simply forwarding X apps from your home machine, you don't need something like MandrakeMove's Flash drive-- all of the stuff can be saved on your home machine, as that's where the remote X apps would be accessing things from anyways. So, any CD-based distro would work for that.