I'm always interested in trying out new live CDs. In fact, this past week or so has seen me burning and playing around with Linux Mint, Wolvix Hunter, Belenix, Knoppix 5.0.1, TrueBSD, Slax, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and now NetBSD Live 2007.

Basically, here's a quick rundown:
-Belenix just didn't work, so it got tossed. End of story. Not worth my time.
-Puppy Linux has gone so incredibly far since I last tried it. It's head and shoulders above DSL and any other mini distro I've tried.
-Wolvix, Mint, Slax, and Knoppix are all good, solid live CDs.

This brings me to the BSD live CDs. They're good, but not great. I've never really used BSD, probably since it seems to be a year or two behind linux distributions in terms of ease of use and polish in general (yes, BSD fans, flame me if you will - it's for advanced users who really know the ins and outs of the system, not for Joe Sixpack).

NetBSD loaded up fine, picked up all of my hardware... so far, so good. The basic setup that's needed to get the disc running isn't the easiest or intuitive. You have to choose your keyboard mapping, for example. The default is German. The menu is text-based, so my mouse wouldn't work in order to select US. I had to try hitting TAB until I somehow got the language selection. It worked in the end. Now, to hit OK to continue... OK and CANCEL were both highlighted by different colours - blue and orange. Which was active and which wasn't? I decided that orange meant "active", so I highlighted OK with the orange colour and hoped for the best. I think I got it right. :)

Next was a timezone selection. There was no list to select from. GMT was default in the text field. I typed in America/New_York and off I went. I have no idea what people in other areas will do... guess at the proper time zone file?

I got to the kde desktop, loaded Firefox and was on the internet in no time. Something odd, though... my usb mouse's scroll wheel doesn't work! I searched through the control panel for mouse-related options. It had an option to select how many lines to scroll down (which would be nice if the wheel worked!!).

A quick google search taught me that you've got to add a line to a config file in order to get the scroll wheel working. Again, this is an example of how a distro can be years behind all of the others. Who DOESN'T have a mouse with a scroll wheel these days? Why do I have to modify a file, kill x, then come back just to get my mouse working properly?

So I killed X, at which point in time my computer froze solid.

I had meant to post this via NetBSD Live, but I'm not going through all of that again just to make one post. So I'm back to linux, writing this, just before going out to find some new live CDs to play with.

NetBSD, if you know what you're doing and don't mind putting in time (sometimes in order to get things to the point where they should be by default), I'm sure you'll have a very solid, secure system. I don't have the time or desire to jump through hoops to get a mouse to work as it should out of the box, so I choose to pass on this one.