LiveCD?

[Alec]

Does anyone know anything about Live CDs?

The idea of having a computer boot just to play Aquaria gets me hot and bothered.

Questions:

* just... how the hell is it done?
* anyway to access the hardrive and/or USB drive? (save files, user settings, etc)
* advantages? disadvantages?

I think the reason I find it interesting, is cause it reminds me of how you'd boot up games on the Amiga 500. 

[Zam]

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/cd-roms.html
A okay guide...the other one seems better.

Okay, here's a guide for gentoo linux users. I'll get back to you if I find anything else...


http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-410389.html

I hope you understand it, I don't   

[wesley]

Does anyone know anything about Live CDs?

The idea of having a computer boot just to play Aquaria gets me hot and bothered.

Questions:

* just... how the hell is it done?

By compressing/decompressing a whole desktop environment and loading files from RAM and/or CD. Linux distro's (especially Knoppix) are good at on-the-fly hardware configuration so you might want to use Knoppix as your base.

* anyway to access the hardrive and/or USB drive? (save files, user settings, etc)

Yes. Should just work if you give the user the option to specify where to save his/her stuff. And if HD/USB autodetection worked flawlessly Since it's your own live cd environment, you could probably make the usb device always point (mount) to the same location for easy in-game access.

* advantages? disadvantages?

first of all: what is the advantage according to you? I don't really see a big advantage at having a game on a live cd. I just want to pop in the cd, install it and play OR: play it directly from the cd without installing as an extra alternative. But I don't want to reboot..

Disadvantages: disk access is slow, available ram gets lowered because some is occupied by the live system.

[Alec]

The advantage is that its awesome. 

[wesley]

Oh, another disadvantage: you can't really get the latest AMD/ATI cards and any NVIDIA card to render 3D without the proprietary drivers. (Actually, for AMD/ATI cards there is an open source 3D DRi driver but it doesn't work for the very latests AMD/ATI cards and in many cases it's significantly slower than the official driver, for NVIDIA an open sourcing project is underway [project nouveau] but that's not really usable for endusers yet.)

In theory, it is possible to detect an AMD/ATI or NVIDIA card and load the proprietary driver (some live cd's did that in the past, for example Kororaa). But I don't think you are allowed to ship the proprietary drivers in a default installation, but I'm not sure what you'd need to do in order to use them.. I have no legal background

[Alec]

You might only be able to release it with freeware.

But I'm more just interested in the LiveCD thing for my own jollies.

[wesley]

Well, yeah, in theory it's possible Actually, it's even possible to have a light Windows XP live environment. Look at BartPE. But I think that a WinXP environment live cd has to be specifically created for one pc, and it is a lot less flexible than a Linuxbased live environment. But hey, you gotta check out every option

[p3ter_st0ry]

I think that if we order the boxed copy, we should get both a Live CD and an installer CD. The Live CD sounds great to me, but it'd also be nice to just be able to just sit down and play without having to read off a CD. Also, as some of us don't have 20x CD read on their computers, load times might get undesirable.

[Alec]

I don't think we'd ever release a LiveCD, I'm more just interested in it for myself.

[shinygerbil]

So you can go round someone's house, and say:

"...yeah, that's like that time when I was making Aquaria."

"Aquaria?"

"Yeah, you know, that masterpiece that won every award going."

"I'm not familiar."

"Here, just pop this CD in..."

<time passes>

"Yeah, it's yours for fifteen bucks."