Scientific linux live dvd

Scientific Linux Live System

2020-10-23: Scientific Linux 7.9 Live CD/DVD’s have been officially released.

The Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD is a bootable CD/DVD that runs Linux directly from CD/DVD without installing. It is based on Scientific Linux (SL), which is recompiled from RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) sources. It uses Unification File System (unionfs) in case of SL4, Another Unionfs (aufs) in case of SL5, and Fedora LiveCD tools in case of SL6 and SL7. All of them allow a read-only filesystem to behave as a writable one. Further squashfs provids on-the-fly decompression that allows to store 2GB software on a normal CD-ROM.

The Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD can be installed on USB flash drive with persistence overlay.

Additionally the Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD can be used to setup a server for Diskless Client. The diskless clients will run Scientific Linux without a local Linux installation getting the operation system over the network. Please note that diskless client support in SL6 is limited.

The following versions of the Scientific Linux LiveCD can be downloaded for 32-bit and 64-bit:

• LiveCD: with gnome and icewm desktop
• LiveDVD: with gnome, kde and icewm desktop
• LiveMiniCD: rescue system with icewm desktop (500-550 MB)

• Read how to boot the Live System from an USB flash drive.
• Read how to create your own LiveCD.
• Read how to install the LiveCD on your local hard disk.

— the latest version of this document is available at http://www.livecd.ethz.ch.

Last modified: Friday, 23-Oct-2020 08:35:55 CEST by Urs Beyerle

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Download

You can download Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD from the official Scientific Linux FTP server:

The iso-files can be found under version, i386/x86_64 in the folder iso. For example for SL 7.5: ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/7.5/x86_64/iso

If you are interested in pre-releases, have a look at http://www.livecd.ethz.ch/download/testing.

Mirrors

Some public mirrors for Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD:

Public Torrents

Verify Download

In order to verify the downloaded ISO image compare the checksum with the one found at the download site (see md5, SHA1SUM, or SHA256SUM file). Assuming you have downloaded the ISO image SL-60-i386-2011-03-07-LiveCD.iso, run on Linux:

to calculate the SHA256 or MD5 sum of the iso file.

On Windows: Windows has no built-in md5sum, sha256sum, or sha1sum commands. But there are compiled versions around which you can use from Windows command line. For example google for md5sum.exe or google for sha256sum.exe.
Download md5sum.exe from http://etree.org/cgi-bin/counter.cgi/software/md5sum.exe.
Download sha256sum.exe from http://www.labtestproject.com/files/sha256sum/sha256sum.exe.
Md5summer beta version supports SHA1 and MD5 sum.

Verify Burned LiveCD

Even if the checksum sum of the iso file is ok, the burned CD could still have some bad sector, e.g bad CDROM media. With SL6 LiveCD it is possible to verify the burned LiveCD. Boot the LiveCD and at the very beginning when you see «Automatic boot in .. seconds» press any key and choose from the list Verify and Boot. Press Esc to escape graphical boot in order to see more detail.

CD/DVD Labels

Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD labels can be found here (as .jpg or as GIMP .xcf files): http://www.livecd.ethz.ch/download/labels

Last modified: Monday, 24-Sep-2018 11:45:18 CEST by Urs Beyerle

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Software

SL4 LiveCD	SL5 LiveCD	SL6 LiveCD	SL7 LiveCD
Kernel	2.6.9	2.6.18	2.6.32	3.10.0
Xorg	6.8.2	7.1	1.7.7	1.15.0
ALSA sound lib	1.0.6	1.0.17	1.0.21	1.0.27
Gnome	2.8 (DVD only)	2.16	2.28	3.8
IceWM	1.2.35	1.2.37	1.2.37	—
KDE	3.3.1	3.5.4 (DVD only)	4.3.4 (DVD only)	4.10.5 (DVD only)
Firefox	3.0.x	3.0.x	3.6.x	31.1
Thunderbird	1.5.x	2.0.x	3.1.x	—
AFS Client	1.4.7	1.4.12	—	—
Libre/OpenOffice	1.1.5 (CD) 2.0.4 (DVD)	3.1.1	3.2.1 (DVD only)	4.1.4 (DVD only)
JDK	1.5 (only 32bit)	1.6.0 (DVD only)	1.6.0 (DVD only)	1.7.0 (DVD only)
Gimp	2.0.5	2.2.13	2.6.9 (DVD only)	2.8.1 (DVD only)

The following software was added compared to the standard SL installation:

• Unionfs (only SL4) — allows r/w rootfs (http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-unionfs.html)
• Aufs (only SL5) — replaces unionfs, allows r/w rootfs (http://aufs.sourceforge.net/)
• Qtparted (only SL4) — partitioning tool (http://qtparted.sourceforge.net)
• Gparted (SL5, SL6) — partitioning tool (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/)
• reiserfs-utils (SL4, SL5, SL6) — utils for reiserfs http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/centosplus
• ntfs-3g (SL5, SL6) — stable NTFS read/write Driver (http://www.ntfs-3g.org/)
• ntfsprogs (SL4, SL5, SL6) — NTFS filesystem libraries and utilities (http://www.linux-ntfs.org)
• dd_rescue (SL4, SL5, SL6) — rescue data from media with errors (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue)
• ddrescue — rescue data from media with errors (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html)
• ms-sys (SL4, SL5) (http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net)
• iperf (SL4, SL5, SL6) — measure maximum TCP bandwidth (http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/)
• rxvt-unicode (only SL5, SL6 LiveMiniCD) — simple terminal (http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html)
• .

For the complete list of packages see *_rpmlist.txt files in the download directory.

Last modified: Sunday, 26-Oct-2014 11:43:51 CET by Urs Beyerle

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Create your own SL6, SL7 LiveCD

IMPORTANT: This description is valid for SL6 and SL7 only. For SL4 and SL5 LiveCD please see Create your own SL4, SL5 LiveCD

Creating a LiveCD image with livecd-tools

For SL6 use the livecd-tools provided in the sl-addons repo. To install livecd-tools run as root

The LiveCD creation is based on kickstart configuration files. You can find the files which were used to create SL6 LiveCDs under /usr/share/livecd-tools or you can download the latest files with svn. The following command will download the kickstart configuration from trunk into a folder called livecd-config-SLx

The following main kickstart files are available for SL6

The above kickstart files can include the following files

The following main kickstart files are available for SL7

Modify the kickstart files to fit your needs. For more information about kickstart configuration files see for example http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart.

To rebuild the SL67 LiveCD, SL67 LiveDVD, and SL67 LiveMiniCD run as root

Or just use your own kickstart file

livecd-creator as some more options. See livecd-creator help:

For more information see also

Test the ISO image

You can burn your ISO image to a CD or DVD ROM to test it. However, it is much easier to test it with qemu or vmplayer

How to run qemu (see man qemu):

Escape full screen in qemu with ALT+CTRL+f

Or alternatively you can use VMware Player.

Last modified: Monday, 11-Jan-2016 08:16:32 CET by Urs Beyerle

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Diskless SL6 Client

IMPORTANT: This description is valid for SL6 only. For SL4 and SL5 please see Diskless SL4 and SL5 Client

BUG — Diskless Client is broken on SL64

Requirements

It’s possible to boot the LiveCD image over PXE. However, in contrast to SL4 and SL5 the whole LiveCD has to be loaded twice into RAM. PXE Client loads the LiveCD into the client RAM and the init script finds and loopback-mounts the ISO image into the client RAM again. Therefore the amount of required RAM is much higher. You need more than twice as much RAM as the size if the LiveCD iso file to successfully boot the LiveCD over PXE. As a rule of thumb use

Further requirements are

• Diskless client should be able to boot over network (PXE 2.0 boot)
• DHCP server which can forward to a TFTP server
• TFTP server which stores the PXE image of the LiveCD

You can either run all services (DHCP, TFTP) on one machine or you can use separate machines. More details about how to setup PXE/DHCP/TFTP can be found at the Syslinux — PXElinux Question page. Here I just give a brief overview.

DHCP Server

The DHCP server points the client to the pxelinux boot loader (file: pxelinux.0). The Client will get pxelinux.0 over TFTP. Here’s a sample entry for an ISC DHCP server:

Note that if your particular TFTP daemon runs under chroot, you almost certainly should not include the /tftpboot prefix in the filename statement

More information can be found here.

Create PXE bootable image

To create a PXE bootable image out of the LiveCD iso file run livecd-iso-to-pxeboot that is included in livecd-tools. First install livecd-tools

Now run livecd-iso-to-pxeboot, where in the example below SL-63-x86_64-2012-08-24-LiveCD.iso is the LiveCD iso file.

This will create a folder tftpboot with the following files

Copy these files to the TFTP server into the folder /var/lib/tftpboot (see below).

TFTP Server

Install the tftp-server

Enable the TFTP server by changing in /etc/xinetd.d/tftp «disable = yes» to disable = no. Per default the TFTP directory on the server is set to /var/lib/tftpboot.

Start TFTP server by starting xinetd

PXE Linux boot loader

The pxelinux configuration files are stored in the directory:

where /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default is the default configuration file. For example:

It’s possible to have more than one PXE configuration file (depending on IP, subnet, MAC). For more info see the PXE Webpage at syslinux. The syntax of the pxelinux configuration files are equal to the one of syslinux configuration file. See How do I Configure SYSLINUX?.

The LABEL (in the above example «sl6») has to be typed on the client at boot prompt. Whereas DEFAULT defines the default boot label. The path to the KERNEL (vmlinuz0) and to initrd (initrd0.img) is given relatively to the /var/lib/tftpboot directory.

Kernel parameters can be passed with the APPEND option. After APPEND everything should be on the same line.

IMPORTANT:Remove from the APPEND line the option check to prevent the verification of the LiveCD image.

If you like, you can add more boot parameters (for example: pw=my_password, cups=mycupsserver, ..).

Last modified: Friday, 03-May-2013 21:31:23 CEST by Urs Beyerle

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