I'm booting Lubuntu from a CD. i.e. on start-up I click 'try Linux' instead of 'install Linux'. I plan to install soon, overwriting my copy of Windows.
My question
Whilst booting from a CD, is it possible to update my drivers? I'm not sure how this can be possible due to CDs being write-once. Hoping someone can explain.
Please note, I'm new to Linux, this is the first time I've used the OS (aside from Android).
You actually can install drivers, although somewhat limited.
Everything you do in the live environment is only stored in the RAM; it gets lost at shutdown. So you can install drivers, but they will be lost as soon as your computer shuts down.
Some drivers aren't automatically loaded after installation. After a reboot, however, they are then loaded automatically, if needed. If you happen to use such a driver module, you can load it manually using the command sudo modprobe <modulename>.
However, some drivers need to be included into the initramfs image, because they need to be loaded before a user logs in. An example for this are storage drivers (HDD, CD) or Graphics drivers. These you can't install in a live system; they require a reboot to work properly. But as the RAM is cleared, you'll lose those drivers.
If you want to keep drivers even after a reboot, you should create a bootable USB stick with persistent memory. My software recommendation for this is UNetBootin. After giving the ISO path, you can set up the size of the persistency; I always choose about 4GiB, but it depends on what you want to do with the live system and how much space there is on the USB stick.
Another way of using drivers in a live system is to customize the ISO. If you do so, you can even install boot-time drivers by chroot'ing into the extracted ISO.
