01-20-2007, 02:29 PM

Has anyone out there successfully booted up one or more of the many Linux live CDs on Intel Macs and had them work well? I am thinking of Knoppix, SuSE Linux and the like. Your experiences, positive or negative, would be most appreciated. Thanks.

01-22-2007, 08:51 PM

I had Ubuntu running off a Live CD in Parallels if that helps.

01-23-2007, 01:00 AM

I've run Knoppix on my iMac without any problems. The only weird thing was when I rebooted into OS X and I opened up Terminal instead of "Welcome to Darwin!" it said something about Knoppix. I thought it was odd, but when I remembered it a few days later it was back to normal.

01-23-2007, 09:28 AM

I was runing ubuntu off a live CD it was ok but you can't add any more programs to the distro once the cd is burned, or save anything. At least I never figured out how to get it to look to my hard drive to save anything. So basically it wasnt to useful for me. Works better for me to run a dual boot setup with parallels then I had access to add stuff.

07-12-2010, 08:00 PM

I've booted a couple of recent Puppy Linux variants (Puppy 4.3.1, Lucid Puppy 5.0, & Quirky Puppy 1.1) on an old core duo macbook pro. Unfortunately, these variants don't recognize Apple's touchpad or mouse bar, so I needed to use an external USB mouse to run. Everything else worked without issue, including automatically setting the display resolution. I did need to manually configure the wireless via a couple of dialog boxes, since I was on a WPA/PSK router, but this was quite straightforward.

Note: I did have a dual boot setup originally (mac OS & Windows partitions, HFS & FAT respectively), so I could save a "usersave" file with personal settings & such to the FAT partition to speed bootup on subsequent boots from the liveCD. I have yet to test the DVD playback capability, but plan to do so in a few days or so. [Puppy Lunux loads the OS into ram, so you can eject the liveCD disk & insert something else, like an audio or video disk.]

I'll report back with further experiences.

I've also run the ISO images of these variants as virtual machines in VMware Fusion 3.0 (under OS X), but there are no compatibility issues & everything ran properly without any hiccups.

07-13-2010, 12:17 AM

I tried playing both DVD's (a couple of Disney movies my kids have) & audio CD's (an audio book from the public library) this evening. [While running a liveCD direct boot of Lucid Puppy 5.0 with an external USB mouse on a core duo MBP.] Since Puppy Linux loads into completely into ram, I was able to eject the liveCD & use the CD drive to play the various media.

No problems either with the audio book or with the Disney DVD's. They both worked flawlessly. I'll try the same disks with Quirky Puppy 1.1 & Puppy Linux 4.3.1, but anticipate no difference, since they essentially use the same programs.