knoppix
By anders pearson 04 Apr 2003
knoppix saved the day again today.
if you haven't played with knoppix before, it's worth a look. in a nutshell, it's a full Debian GNU/Linux system complete with kde 3.1, open office, mozilla and about every other piece of linux software you could imagine. all crammed onto one bootable cd-rom. take the cd and put it in any x86 machine and boot from it and in about a minute or two, you'll be sitting in front of a fully working kde desktop running off a RAM disk (it will also autodetect and use any linux swap partitions it finds on the host machine). all drives are mounted read-only by default so it won't overwrite your windows installation or anything nasty like that.
one of the really sweet things about knoppix is that its hardware detection is fantastic. every machine i've tried it on, old or new, it's picked up and properly configured every piece of strange hardware. seriously, it puts Redhat and the other commercial linux vendors to shame. with no other distribution have i not had to configure anything. for hardware detection knoppix leaves every other distro i've tried and windows in the dust and may even surpass MacOS.
i first burned myself a knoppix disk when i was getting ready to install gentoo on a machine and wanted to make sure i had a good rescue disk in case i screwed something up in the process. sure enough, i screwed things up a few times and knoppix came in quite handy. normal rescue disks just give you a text console and enough utilities to repair messed up partitions, compile a new kernel, etc. knoppix gave me all those utilities plus a full graphical desktop and a network connection, so if i didn't know exactly what i'd done wrong, i could search online forums or use IRC to get some help. (and, if you don't like the idea of being stuck at a text console for the first few days of a gentoo install before you've gotten X-windows and all that stuff compiled, you can install gentoo from knoppix).
i've been told that some road warrior computer consultants now travel without a laptop. they just carry a knoppix cd and a USB compactflash drive or some other USB memory device. then, when they arrive at their client's office they just grab any free machine, boot from the knoppix cd, plug in the CF drive and tell knoppix to use that as their home directory.
since it just mounts drives read-only by default, it's also a great way to demo linux to people who have never played with it before. just pop the cd in and they can immediately start trying out linux without having to go through any disk partitioning and time-consuming installations. since it's running off a compressed disk image on a CD, applications are a little slow to load, but otherwise its performance is quite acceptable.
the second time knoppix really came in handy for me was right after lani moved in. her computer didn't survive the move, but she had some Word docs on a CD that she needed to make some changes to and send back to her previous employer asap. my computer was still only partway through a gentoo install and i didn't have openoffice installed on it yet. since gentoo compiles everything from source, installing openoffice would potentially have taken many hours that she didn't really have. luckily, i remembered that knoppix included openoffice so we just booted that and she was able to edit her documents that way.
it came in useful again a few days later when lani's friend from russia was visiting. she wanted to check her email but couldn't find any computers around that properly supported cyrillic. knoppix has good support for russian and a number of other languages, so the knoppix disk came out again and pretty soon we had a cyrillic desktop up and running for her.
today, a coworker's windows machine crashed hard and refused to reboot. the harddrive was making strange noises and giving off error messages left and right. obviously the drive was failing. naturally, there were very important documents on the drive that hadn't been backed up anywhere else and would be very time-consuming to recreate if they couldn't be recovered. peter and i booted off knoppix. the drive kept generating errors during the boot process and i was doubtful that anything could recover the files at that point. somehow though, knoppix managed to mount it, and peter was able to copy the files off and upload them to an ftp server with no problem.
being easy for newbies to use and a powerful tool for expert users is a rare combination. it's been a long time since i've been as impressed with a piece of software as i have been with knoppix. to actually use as a long term system, i prefer gentoo these days, but from now on i plan to keep a knoppix disk nearby.