4MLinux is an open source and independent distribution of Linux built from scratch and designed to be used as a system rescue Live CD, for watching videos and listening to music, for deploying servers using the inetd daemon, as well as for playing Linux games.
It has been designed from the ground up to be used directly from a CD disc or USB flash drive. However, users can install the distribution to a local disk drive using the built-in installer from the live session.
Distributed as a dual-arch Live CD
This is the main and first edition of the 4MLinux (four M – Maintenance, Multimedia, Miniserver and Mystery). It’s distributed as a single Live CD ISO image of approximately 50MB in size. Supported architectures includes 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (amd64).
Boot options
Two boot modes are available, with default display settings or using the VESA framebuffer. We recommend using only the first one, but if your graphics card is not supported, then you really need to use the second option.
Unfortunately, the Live CD does not boot directly into the graphical environment, as it will first ask users to set up a password for the root (system administrator) account, which will be used to log into the live session.
From the shell prompt, you will need to type the “startx” command in order to enter the graphical desktop, which is comprised of a taskbar located on the bottom edge of the screen, a dock (application launcher) on the upper side of the screen, and a system monitoring widget on the desktop.
Default applications
Default applications include the QupZilla web browser, PathFinder file browser, SMPlayer and MPlayer video players, SMTube YouTube browser, XPaint digital painting software, Clam AntiVirus virus scanner, GParted disk partitioning tool, as well as a handful of board games.
Another interesting feature is the ability to install the LibreOffice office suite, Oracle Virtualbox virtualization software, and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
