The Live distro ! This is why you should always have one in your pocket …

Jun 202012

Article by Giuseppe Sanna

How many times one of your friend has called you to his home to complain about a problem with the PC? What to do there then? If he’s a friend we try to give him a hand. So we improvise as computer technicians. I can only give you a hand improvising, in turn, I’ll give you a list of things to have with you when you go to their home.
I focused the article, as you can see from the title, mostly on the Live Distro. Why this choice? Simply because if the PC does not want to start after a corruption of the Operating System what remains to do is only one thing! Format all. So we must first find a way to recover the data from the PC that not start.

Let’s start as first thing, it is always good to have with us a laptop with an Internet Key. None of us is omniscient and so a search on the Web could be very helpful. Keep with you some USB flash drive that can come in handy to save information. Some good screwdriver. A simple software problem can result from a few hardware problem, and so the screwdriver may serve! And please, do not ever trust the owner of your patient! Maybe he has, for example, an Internet Key that in your PC does not work. So it’s always better to bring your own possessions. Tools tested and surely working!

Anotehr thing that we can not miss is a Live Distro installed on USB, in the case of motherboards after the 2002, or on CD if your patient has some more years ! You may wonder just why we must always have a Live distro with us? The answers are multiple, but today I will focus exclusively on the main two.

First, as mentioned before, if you own a Live you can access data on a PC also if it’s installed OS don’t start anymore. You can then execute the transfer of data before proceeding with a very healthy format. Another motivation is even more important, often it happens to have the need to use a PC. Maybe we have left at home our PC and our friend has a Netbook. Now there are two possibilities: either use his netbook and go to insert various passwords, search our pages a thousand Google results, access to the cloud for that particular pass that you do not remember, or simply to start the Netbook or Notebook or Desktop, with our usb-stick (with our live) inserted and get our custom operating system. Here we’ll find all our saved passwords, files that we use and so on. We are going to use that PC only as a guest of our operating system. No trace left once that the PC is turned off! So no history or saved passwords to delete ! Now for the practical part. How to install this Live on a USB or CD? Suffice it to say that in my opinion the best one out there is Puppy Linux (Ubuntu-based) and that you will need a USB stick of at least 8-16GB to make sure that you always have space!

What are you waiting? Run download the iso and install Puppy Linux into the USB on your keychain!