grml live

You won't find Grml in the top 100 of DistroWatch's Page Hit Ranking, but this distro has been around since 2004. Based on Debian Testing, Grml can be run live from a flash drive and ships with loads of system administration tools. It comes with the Fluxbox window manager rather than a full-featured desktop environment, and you'll get mc and nano instead of a fancy GUI file manager and text editor, but Firefox ESR is included.

I downloaded the grml64-full_2017.05 iso (the download was only about 600 MB), used dd to put it on a flash drive, and booted up, with no problems. Not much to the default setup:

Here's a shot with the right-click desktop menu opened up:

Here, running Firefox, mc, and xterm:

For a list of included packages, see: http://grml.org/files/grml64-full_2017.05/dpkg.list

For more info, check out the Grml website: http://grml.org/
Grml at DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=grml

deuterium

I have a Compaq Presario CQ57 notebook that doesn't seem to play nicely with any 64-bit Linux installation I try on it. This old notebook has only 2 GB RAM, so I thought maybe it would work better with a 32-bit system.

To test this, I downloaded the 32-bit version of the latest BunsenLabs release, codenamed "Deuterium" (bl-Deuterium-i386_20170429.iso). The Jessie-based Deuterium is the same release that good ol' Dedoimedo ripped to shreds in this review.

Here's a shot from the live session, with the desktop right-click menu opened up:

And here's what the fresh installation looked like:

Doing the installation was a breeze, and Deuterium performed like a champ on this hardware, My intent was to keep just about everything at the defaults, but I've been having so much fun playing around with BunsenLabs and Openbox that I couldn't help but tweak a few things and customize the desktop a little more to my tastes:

I think that BunsenLabs is a great little distro, and I'm anxiously awaiting the Stretch-based release (codename: "Helium"). For another reviewer's take on this distro, see: http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/linuxandubuntu-review-of-bunsenlabs-linux