I have a folder on my backup hard drive that I use to hold ISOs and distros I download until I have time to properly play with them. Last night I remembered I had Linux XP Desktop in there, as well as the live CD for the LXDE desktop, called PUD GNU/Linux.

Without going into too much detail, I installed Linux XP Desktop just for kicks, and while it does a fantastic job as an XP knockoff, I couldn’t get it to work with my Intel PRO 2200BG wireless card, and so that was kind of a dealbreaker. I’d give you a screenshot, but to be honest, it looks a lot like KDE molded to look like XP, and you can imagine what that looks like overall.

Video was a bit of a problem too; it kept pushing my 1600×1200 monitor into 640×480, which stinks. I got that figured out through the Windows-esque control panels, and honestly, aside from the networking issues, Linux XP looks and behaves like the Windows product of the same name. If I had a machine that absolutely had to have a XP knockoff on it, I certainly would think it over.

I could have spent more time with it and possibly gotten into the nitty gritty of it, but I had to boot into a live environment just to get internet access, and wasn’t keen on dredging up a firmware driver and installing it. I’m not going to mark down the distro because it couldn’t sync with my wireless card — that happens with Arch too, and I still use Arch — but on a trial run you just want things to fall into place.

LXDE stole the show though. The PUD GNU/Linux live CD runs like an ultralight Dapper installation, and once it’s up and running, it behaves a lot like an IceWM version of Dapper. There are a lot of the applications on there that I would install myself, if I was putting together a distro — PCManFM, Firefox (although I would have picked Kazehakase), LXPanel and a few other nifty things. And while it’s not the most svelte live CD you can use, it’s a great live CD for Ubuntu.

Since it’s Ubuntu driven, everything is in the “right” place (or at least the place you’re used to), and by switching out the repositories and pulling out the few things you don’t want, you can more or less reconfigure it to a live environment you want. Of course, it’s all eradicated when you power down, but it has already supplanted my Damn Small Linux CD as an emergency CD.

Look into it when you can take a break from Feisty.