How to install a Live CD without repartitioning hard drives...

Thanks, liraz, for your clarification of the purpose and value of T/J/U.

In my very particular situation, I will look on Turnkey as a safety net - if my present efforts don't win out, then I'll stick a spare hard drive in the pc and have the system operational without further fuss. I feel less stressed already!

TurnKey Linux Live CD appliances are built to give you a better starting point relative to installing Ubuntu from scratch. This can be very useful for both novices and experts alike.

Unlike XAMPP, TurnKey appliances are not limited to testing and development, because under the hood they are really versions of Ubuntu that are optimized for specific tasks.

In other words, if you install TurnKey you'll get a system that is just as stable and secure as if you install Ubuntu from scratch.

See Ubuntu documentation for TurnKey for further information.

I hope this doesn't intrude on the thread. It seems to me that I have the same question, only asked from a point a lot lower down the food chain...

I too would like to try the joomla ubuntu Turnkey download. But I don't want to wipe my HD or even risk wiping it.

I am tired of trying to guess why my own installation of XAMPP on ubuntu (my only os) won't work. I'm sure it's down to my ignorance of file permissions and how to be/when not to be root.

I don't seek advice about that - I know I'll have to learn the hard way, and slowly.

However, it would be great if I could use the Turnkey ubuntu joomla download to
a) practice making a joomla site
b) practice uploading site(s) to a paid-for web host
c) finally, make and upload a real web site.


Is turnkey ubuntu joomla intended to be a learning/authoring tool (even for someone as ignorant and inexperienced as me) or is it a savvy professional's web server, meant to be secure and ready to hook up to the internet?

Thanks, too.

Booting the system live means it will run in non-persistent demo mode, so what ever changes you make to the running system will be lost when you reboot.

You could however backup your changes manually to the local harddrive, or over the network, but this would require some command line interaction.

We have a couple of ideas which might interest you, but currently we don't have an ETA on them.
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/turnkeylinux/+spec/backup-support
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/turnkeylinux/+spec/optional-live-overla...

If you are contemplating installing in a dual boot configuration, I highly recommend you read this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

Finally, I would recommend using virtual machine software. This would provide you with a virtual pc in which you can experiment with an appliance, and install it for persistence to retain any changes you make.

I hope this answers your question.

I've taken a look at what Dyne:bolic are doing to implement "docking" and basically its a simple form of local persistence.

I wouldn't rule out integrating such a feature into TurnKey Linux but due to our workload and the abundance of viable alternatives it probably won't be something we implement ourselves in the short term.

TurnKey Linux is an opensource project though, so if someone else is suitably interested perhaps it will be implemented by them and will then get rolled into our next releases.

As Alon suggested, If you want to run TurnKey Linux for development and testing purposes without having to go through the pain of repartitioning your hard drives and such, the best way to go is to use Virtual Machine software of which there are several free alternatives.

We recommend VirtualBox which is an excellent opensource VM. This is what we use ourselves at work and for developing TurnKey.

Considering that you are running Windows, you might also want to take a look at Microsoft Virtual PC, which is not opensource but is free to download and use.