A-V Linux

Of Ubuntu Linux and NetBSD, Danger wrote: “I’m sad to report that neither one was of any use for playing songs and movies, but hopefully I’ll come across a LiveCD that can do that soon.”

Help is here, in the form of DyneBolic Linux (http://www.dynebolic.org). DyneBolic is a LiveCD-only distro that’s oriented toward audio-visual use. It comes with media players, editing software and netcasting software. Because it’s oriented toward A-V work, it’s light in other areas, e.g., it comes with AbiWord instead of OpenOffice, though it has a surprisingly robust games suite.

Using Window Maker as its default windows manager, DyneBolic is designed to be usable on older machines. It cannot (at the version I have) be installed to hard drive, but it offers an option called nesting, wherein part of it is copied to a “nest” on a pre-existing partition, thus allowing the user to boot from CD, then eject the CD, freeing it for other uses.

Cheers,
Gary