Best LinuxLiveCD?

I am wondering if anyone of you know of a good liveCD that boots up fast and gets right to the point. Doesnt have to have a nice GUI, let alone a GUI at all

What are you using the live cd for?

if your doing stuff online you need to use a usb stick. ie ubuntu live usb

if your going to run a cd i would go with mint.

http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

 

For running a live CD/USB, I would strongly recommend puppy. You could also create an Arch live CD or USB if you have no use for a GUI.

I use Vector Linux 7.0 Gold. It's Slackware based and the fastest precompiled distro with package manager around, and easy to use, and it's faster with GUI than most distros without, but it's a bit older.

If you want the fastest, compile one for your system, with Gentoo or Slackware, but those require compiling every bit of software.

If you want cutting edge, go with Manjaro net edition (no GUI), and if you want bleeding edge, go with Arch or Fedora Core.

I would want a liveCD or liveUSB to boot any kind of distro on our school computers, preferabely online, since windows runs like crap on them.

Aren't though computers networked? Why would you use a USB if they are networked, you can probably just boot them from the network and do a net install, it's faster and simpler. If it's for school and for use by students, I'd certainly go for Manjaro, easy to use and more fun, it's a distro made by/for younger people, and fast, and the tools for a net install are in the repos. You could get the standard XFCE version, which is very fast, even on older or slower computers, or you could get the net build, which has no GUI preinstalled, and is minimal but fully functional.

Maybe a minimal distro like Vector7 isn't cute enough.

If it's not for students though, I'd go for a solid Fedora install, Fedora is fast enough to work fluently on even Atom netbooks (I use Fedora19+Gnome 64-bit on an old Atom netbook with 2GB of RAM every day, and it runs feels faster for regular productivity use than a Win7 desktop computer with a hexcore Xeon and 64 GB of RAM), even the Gnome variant, and it's solid as hell in terms of security features and management. The XFCE version is faster, but with less bling.

If you need centralized management features though, certainly consider OpenSuSE as an alternative, because it has great GUI management features out of the box, and it's as fast as Fedora, and also RPM based. With OpenSuSE, I would go for the KDE version. It feels slower, but when you set the animations to "fast", all of a sudden it doesn't anymore, it makes a huge difference. The advantage is that without previous knowledge of linux-based networking, you can easily install and synchronise software over all the networked PC's at once for instance, or make a full system backup of all the PC's, etc... via an easy to use central GUI on just one admin machine. With other linux distros, this is possible too, but you'll need to install stuff and know some stuff to check the results etc... you won't be able to do it all with just one single GUI tool.

Thank you, I tried out both Fedora and Manjaro XFCE on my main rig and my dad's old laptop (2GB of RAM and a weak AMD processor). Both of them seemes to run pretty well, and I have decided to use Manajaro XFCE just for student purpose and it seemes like the most relaxing OS. Once again, thank you!

PS: You might have misunderstood. Im not a school computer manager, I am more or less a student myself that just want to use a faster OS for the machines, and yes I know the BIOS password for all the machines, so I know I can boot a liveUSB from there.