CDlinux 0.5.6 Alpha review

CDlinux is a CD based mini Linux distribution, which runs from a CDROM

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Xun-Hong Zhao

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CDlinux is a CD based mini Linux distribution, which runs from a CDROM. It aims to be a handy administration/rescue tool for system administrators as well as general users.

CDlinux is highly user configurable, supports a wide range of hardware (PCMCIA, SCSI, USB, etc.) and many networking protocols (FTP, SSH, NFS, SMB, DHCP, etc.).

CDlinux also has good support for CJK, especially Simplified Chinese.

These are some useful gadgets from CDlinux. Note, you do not need to download them, if you have downloaded CDlinux. They are already included. They are listed here just in case you may want to use them in a normal Linux installation, and don't want to download the whole CDlinux bundle. And they are also as examples on how works are done under Linux, in a better and more decent way comparing with other platforms.

file-opt (~1k) This shell script finds identical files in the CURRENT directory, and hard link them to save space. It's useful when building so called "N in 1" CD images like "Win2k 3in1" in Linux .

mkisofs-CJK (~380k) This is a patched version of mkisofs-2.0.3, it supports CJK joliet filenames. The original GB (Simplified Chinese) Code Page was derived from the official Linux kernel, and has some errors. I fixed this bug according to the correct cp936 file (~160k). This version can handle GB joliet filenames correctly now.

It also supports the new "joliet-long" parameter, and supports joliet filenames as long as 103 unicode characters (207 bytes). So you can even use it to build "WinPE" CD images in Linux.

The source of the CJK patch is available here (~390k). Note that, this patch is only a quick and dirty hack, I only tested it in Slackware-8.1.

ren2upper (~2k) When being invoked as "ren2upper", this script will change file/folder names in the CURRENT directory to upper case. And, if being invoked as "ren2lower", it will change them to lower case. It's useful when exchanging data between Unix and Windows hosts.

These gadgets are either shell scripts or compiled with gcc-2.95.3 and linked against glibc-2.2.5, so they should run happily on most recent Linux distributions.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds support for writing to NTFS.
It fine tunes the X autoconfig script.
A script has been added for users to choose their preferred screen resolution.
There are many bugfixes.