Chapter 2

Booting in Live Mode

Booting a Predator-OS ISO Image in Live Mode

Running Predator-OS directly from either a USB stick or a DVD is a quick and easy way to experience how Debian stable works for you and how it works with your hardware. Most importantly, it does not alter your computer’s configuration in any way and a simple restart without the USB stick or DVD is all that’s needed to restore your machine to its previous state. A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system, which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer’s memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer’s configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.

With a live Predator-OS, you can do almost anything you can from an installed Debian stable:

Safely browse the internet without storing any history or cookie data.

Access files and edit files stored on your computer or USB stick.

Create new office suite documents and save them remotely.

Fix broken configurations to get a computer running again.

The concept of live booting is actually quite simple. With a live Linux distribution (not all distributions come in “live” flavors), you can boot your machine from either a CD/DVD disk or from a USB flash drive and choose to try out the operating system without making any changes to your hard drive.

How this works is by running the entire system from volatile memory (RAM). The operating system and all programs are usable, but run from memory. Because of this, you can boot the live system, test/use it for as long as you need, and then reboot the system (remembering to remove the live media) to return to your original system. Live distributions can be used for several purposes: Testing a Linux distribution: This is the best way to see if Linux is for you. Testing hardware: If you are unsure if your hardware will work with a Linux distribution, run it live and find out.

Live distributions also form a collection of very important tools that handle crucial tasks, such as:

Data recovery

System recovery

Predator-OS Linux has the functionality of being installed on a hard drive. The installation is possible both in UEFI and in MBR. Predator-OS Linux is 100% ompatible with classic BIOS called LEGACY and a UEFI BIOS.

BIOS vs. UEFI Traditional PC firmware was called the BIOS, for Basic Input/Output System. Over the last decade, however, BIOS has been supplanted by a more formalized and modern standard, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). You will often see UEFI referred to as “UEFI BIOS,” but for clarity, we will reserve the term BIOS for the legacy standard in this book. Most systems that implement UEFI can fall back to a legacy BIOS implementation if the operating system they are booting does not support UEFI. UEFI is the current revision of an earlier standard, EFI. References to the name EFI persist in some older documentation and even in some standard terms, such as “EFI system partition.” In all but the most technically explicit situations, you can treat these terms as equivalent.