[conspire] test drive of new laptop

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Mint gave an option for "live", but it didn't seem to have any
> functionality.

I have to confess I don't have a lot of experience with Linux Mint, but
hear a lot of praise for it from users, including its 'live' mode.  You
might have downloaded the wrong image.  According to
http://www.linuxmint.com/documentation/user-guide/Cinnamon/english_17.1.pdf,
it seems you would want the liveDVD image.

> The Debian image only has options for installing.  

No, the 'Official Debian' _main_ image has only options for installing.

For that purpose (live-CD Debian operation), I think you need one of:

Debian Live:  https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
Aptosid:  http://aptosid.com/ (not updated since early 2013, a shame,
  but OTOH it's a rolling distribution and there's a snapshot ISO, so the lack
  of recent official releases doesn't matter much)
Siduction:  http://news.siduction.org/ (last updated early 2014, similar
  remarks apply)

Aptosid and Siduction are live CD images of desktop Debian based on the
'unstable' branch with additional stabilisation packages from their
respective repos.  (Siduction was a fork from the Aptosid project to 
focus more on specifically Desktop Environments.)

Debian Live is Official Debian ('stable' release) remastered for live-CD
usage.

Personally, I've used Aptosid for many years as my go-to live-CD image
for essentially all uses, it having replaced Knoppix in that role.

I believe that with all three (Debian Live, Aptosid, and Siduction), 
you occasionally find you need to furnish to the running live system a
.deb of some hardware-support package for crummy hardware, such as
firmware-linux-nonfree
(https://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-linux-nonfree).  You mount
a USB stick containg the .deb, and 'dpkg -i' the thing.