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:

Any feedback is very welcome, please mail me or to the Scientific-Linux-Users mailing list.


--- 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