I remember being very interested in programming in middle/high school, but all the environments in our school computer lab had windows (this was in India), and I think at that time (maybe 2001-2003) I didn't even know there were other operating systems.
Our school was participating in something called International Cyber Olympiad, and of course I gave the eligibility exam.
They sent all students who passed a Knoppix Live CD to prepare for the actual competition. We did not have a PC at home until a couple of years later, but I used that CD in any PC I could find anywhere - the school computer lab, the school library computers, and my dad's office computers. It was my first experience with a Linux system (and I found it awesome). Also my first experience with gcc instead of borland c++.
Similar experience at my early uni days in UK - no PC at home and lugging around a heavy laptop wasnt so easy, so I had Slackware on a USB stick and would routinely go to the computer clusters to boot it up over the Windows mess they had.
The physics dept. was full of GNU evangelists, so thankfully they had real Linux machines. Everywhere else though, Microsoft had sunk its claws into
When I was a kid I got obsessed with Linux, but my family only had one PC in the living room. After an attempt to set up Windows/Linux dual boot where I messed up the partition table, my parents banned me from tinkering with it. Luckily I discovered Knoppix and other live distros, which allowed me to boot into a safe environment to play around in.
I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!
After that I always had a CD wallet thing with copies of sysresccd and supergrubdisk and others (including I think an old knoppix cd from a linux magazine).
When I first started going towards Linux I tried, in this order:
* Puppy linux, because I liked puppies.
* College linux, because it was for education, and I was in secondary school, and college sounded fancy.
* Adriane Knoppix, because it's what came up when you did a web search for "knoppix download" -- that was interesting, if you didn't know, ADRIANE is for blind people.
* Whoppix (which became Whax) -- because I could actually find the download.
* Backtrack linux (because that was apparently better than WHAX)
* Slackware, because backtrack was based on this and "only script kiddies use Backtrack".
I did the same as you, tried to keep things to liveCDs but I always got the urge to install them, so would do it periodically until everything broke. This also meant I had to deal with whatever was broken (usually wifi).
One thing I remember very fondly though, which isn't a linux, is the leaked Geek Squad rescue CD... I'd give a decent chunk of change for an updated one of those..
I imagine that there are hundreds of us with very similar stories! I absolutely banjaxed our Windows partition after installing Mandrake or Suse or something on more than one occasion. I learned a lot about Linux, but probably more about the importance of backups haha.
Knoppix LiveCD in 2004 was my very first try at Linux. The fear of HDD partitioning my parents' PC delayed me from installing Ubuntu Warty by a few months.
I also first used Linux via knoppix around 2004. Great introduction. Though my big sister said it was difficult to install it to the hard drive because it's meant to be a live cd, but she managed to do it, .
I had a similar experience that led me to Knoppix when I was a kid. I was tinkering around with a hex editor and messed up the Windows MBR with it so I found and burned Knoppix to a disc at a library. I remember my mom complaining about things being... different
I also wanted to experiment with Linux at a young age, and so I tried booting it with LOADLIN[1]. I didn't know what I was doing, but I did successfully boot the kernel with a minimal rootfs! So minimal, it didn't have an init — which of course causes a quick kernel panic. Didn't yet have the know how to figure out what I was doing wrong. My mom asked "did you mess up the computer?" Nope, since with LOADLIN you didn't need to format.
Had to give up on that approach, but discovered Knoppix shortly afterwards, and that taught me Linux.
Same story! I discovered Porteus (based on slackware) and used it from a 8gb sandisk usb for years. It shipped with xfce and was a blast to tinker with. I learned to compile software from source for it because the package management was non-existent. Taught me a lot. AAAND it's still live: https://www.porteus.org
I used a Porteus boot USB a couple of years ago to rescue the secondary hard drive on my Dad's ancient Windows 7 PC. The drive had partially died, making it inaccessible under Windows -- but 99% of the disk was still readable with Linux's NTFS support. There was some glitch that caused the GUI to lock up shortly after booting about 80% of the time, but if I could make it to the console tty it worked like a charm!
If Klaus Knopper or his wife Adriane finds this thread I want to say thank you for all the useful tools that you included in Knoppix. I learned so much and it was greatly simplified by the ease of operation of the live boot CD with its auto-detection of hardware. I really appreciate all the hard work that y'all have put into Knoppix over the years. I downloaded the latest version less than a month ago from knopper.net so that I can muck around on a new mini-pc and show an elderly relative how easy some of this stuff really is. Still an excellent toolset. Thanks!
In Grade 10 we'd pass around a Knoppix CD in the computer lab to boot up into something a bit more useful than the "Student Vista" locked down Windows XP machines.
I remember there being a sliding puzzle game in the theme of assembling molecules. I remember this because I remember a very classic argument between two teenagers over "propene" being a typo of "propane" vs. being an actual chemical. If only they were sitting in front of a device that could help them find the answer.
Puppy via USB was one of my first. My real first was SUSE distributed via CD-ROM in a GNU/Linux magazine. I used to run Puppy from not a usb drive but a hard drive in an external closure plugged into the USB port. I was a poor college kid and that's all I had.
Nice to see Knoppix featured here. This is basically the distro that pioneered the "Live CD" Linux where you can play with the full system without the need to commit to a full install. This was huge at a time where it was quite difficult for a non-technical user to install Linux. In addition, it was based on Debian, which at the time still was much more difficult to install than now, so for many people Knoppix was a way to use Debian without having to use that old installer. To top that, it used KDE.
Since then, a lot of Live Linux distros emerged, with various features offered; Debian got a much better installer; and then Knoppix dropped KDE Plasma as their desktop environment. All of that made me to move over to better "Live Linux" distros.
At one point in the very early 2000s my HDD failed and I was diskless for a while. I used Knoppix to be able to run things using a floppy to store my configs.
I've been using Linux as daily driver ever since. The necessity to do a trial by fire made me pretty good at it and helped me in my professional life as well.
Similar but with a 16mb usb drive for my settings and apps.
Ran pretty well since I only used an msn clone, web browser, occasional types assignment and some Winamp clone. Had an an external hdd for my media do it covered everything and just worked.
My setup was a Compaq Armada M300 laptop with a keyboard that was missing a few key caps, a battery that was shot to all hell and held only 5 minutes of charge, and a HDD that was completely broken.
I used a 128 MB USB stick for settings and my home directory, and had a Knoppix disc in the CD drive at all times.
It did indeed run pretty well, at least well enough for me to play around with it as a 14-15 year old kid and until I had finally saved up enough money to get me a new (used) 20GB HDD on eBay.
I quickly learned to symlink certain things (usually the least-updated ones) to folders in $HOME, and put together some bash scripting to copy stuff back and forth. By the time I had a replacement disk I was already somewhat fluent.
And yeah, hardly ever had to reboot, only when doing radical changes in setup. I remember I was using windowmaker instead of the default KDE 3 after a while, although I don't quite remember the thought process that led me to it.
Kinda wild that in primary/early middle school basically Knoppix and Wienux live distributions set me up for what has later become a career working with Linux/DevOps/SRE. Can't thank everyone who made Linux so accessible to people at a young age enough.
I remember a cool implementation detail about the earliest Knoppix version (don't remember which one) I had that was documented somewhere on that disc - when constructing a release filesystem image, the boot process was instrumented to get an ordered list of files being read. Then that list was fed into an image building program so when written to a CD, the files will be organized in an optimal order so a linear read with some readahead would get you a better boot time.
Super nostalgic for me just to see the name. My computing teacher gave me a Knoppix LiveCD when I was about 18 and I immediately fell in love with Linux. Within weeks I was (repeatedly) attempting to install Gentoo on my first computer that I built. What a wonderful project!
Fun to see this on the front page. I'm curious if ops intent was to share something cool is trigger a bunch of nostalgia because they definitely did the latter.
I remember using this when it first came out. It was a game changer for doing forensics back before full disk encryption was a common thing.
I frequently see things on HN where people just share the website of a well known project. I assume it's for people who legit never heard of it. Maybe they're younger. I think of a saying, every year a new generation discovers the Beatles for the first time.
Very nostalgic! I remember using this a few times around maybe 2005 when a Windows system got corrupted. Knoppix would boot from the CD and let you recover files from your HD. Loved it
I built a 40 (later 80) node cluster with clusterknoppix ~2006 to run a bunch of physics simulations off of old library computers after I replaced a bunch of PSU fans. Kept my cubicle toasty until we moved them into a random subterranean room I think was used for some early nuclear research at university.
Knoppix was basically the dawn of mass-market Linux, and I think it goes unsung. Installing Linux on a fresh computer, or even worse setting up dual boot, was way too much of a commitment to try it out. Knoppix gave us live CDs, and everybody who had been making excuses for years could test drive to their hearts content and find out it wasn't so hard.
It was certainly my Linux start. I'd been embarrassingly defying friends for years and sticking to Windows because I'm a creature of habit - thank god I jumped ship before Vista, when all my habits would have changed by force.
I think the 1-2 punch of Knoppix and Vista might be responsible for a significant portion of current Linux usage, at least in a Butterfly Effect way. People who were trying out Linux when Vista came had an easy escape hatch, and wouldn't have felt any urge to turn back until Windows had reverted to usable again.
When I would fix Windows machines for pocket change, Knoppix was one of the first tools I'd reach for. It made separating janky hardware and janky software much easier.
I hacked up a (not SMP-safe!) compressed loopback driver for a now-forgotten startup's "bootable business card" rescue disk. Over a year later I received an email from someone wanting to use it who was trying to port it forward.
When someone on my team started playing with this new Knoppix thing I was blown away: not just a rescue disk but a full-on distribution!
Moral: publish your hacks!
Hey, I found the email:
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 02:17:47 +0200
From: Klaus Knopper <knopper@linuxtag.de>
To: Paul.Russell@linuxcare.com.au
Subject: Compressed Loopback device
Message-ID: <20000603021747.A17496@linuxtag.de>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i
Sender: rusty@linuxcare.com.au
Hello Mr. Russel,
I'm trying to use your compressed loopback device as found on the LinuxCare
rescue CD-Rom, for my selfconfiguring Linux distribution that runs entirely
from CD (including XFree and KDE).
Unfortunately, the version that I got of the cloop device seems to act quite
instable (of course I recompiled it for Kernel 2.2.15, which should not
differ all too much from 2.2.14). I blame it on the fact that the file handle
is being read from stdin of insmod, but it could be something different.
With an SMP-Kernel, cloop.o crashes immediately on insmod when calling
fget(0). With a non-SMP kernel, it kills the kernel block buffer system,
shutting down all other block devices as well, when accessing certain large
files on an ext2 filesystem within the compressed block device file. It seems
that the ll_rw_block() routine fails in that case, and wait_for_buffer() never
returns, locking up something in the kernel block buffer management.
Do you maybe have a newer version of cloop that I can start working on?
Btw, I found and fixed the bug in extract_compressed_fs.c, but I think it
would really be nice if the sources for the whole package could be downloaded
from LinuxCare somewhere without having to get the whole CD-Rom image.
If I find the cloop lockup-bug before you have time to answer, I will send a
patch.
Regards
-Klaus Knopper
---
Klaus Knopper LinuxTag 2000 - Europes largest Linux Expo
This is a blast from the past. Knoppix saved my life a few times, it was the easiest way to mount a drive with a broken partition table or something else went that haywire with a dual-boot system. It was also the safest option for doing something on a public computer without leaving a trace (though back then NIC drivers were always a bit finicky).
My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.
Knoppix got really popular in Germany in the 2000s when it was still common that PC magazines were sold with CD-ROMs. Especially c't, Germany's most prestigious computer magazine, made Knoppix popular with their bootable Linux CDs for data rescue issues.
c't published articles about a few programs that I wrote (many years ago). They always sent me copies of the magazine with a CD when they did that. The CD had all the free/open source programs that were discussed in the magazine. Very good publisher.
I had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB hdd. or maybe it was later on my Pentium II with 128Meg and 6.4GB Fireball!
Either way I used it a good few times to rescue data and generally fiddle with all sort of pcs from this era. (late 90's to early 2000')
Same. Back then we weren't booting off USB memory sticks: CDs it was. Knoppix and memtest to troubleshoot friends and family's PCs were my go-to tools. Always had a few bootable CD roms in the car. Heck I'd even take a HDD with me and wouldn't hesitate to open other people's PC and hook my "rescue HDD".
Worst memory ever troubleshooting a friend's PC was in the 386 or 486 days (didn't have Knoppix yet but was already on Slackware): he asked me to backup his files and I hooked one of my HDD as the main (as it was booting fine) and hooked my friend's HDD as a "slave" (that's how the terminology was back then). But I got sloppy and just let my friend's HDD sitting on the tower. Metallic PC tower. I turned the computer on, we heard an horrible noise and we saw a puff of smoke.
Old HDDs were kinda wild from that standpoint: much more exposed conductive parts than the later ones.
I just managed to short-circuit his HDD and it, nearly literally, went up in smoke. I was feeling really bad and gave him a HDD of mine. Oh well at least he had a working computer (but zero files of his).
For many years I had a Knoppix Live CD and later DVD/USB in my work bag, so that could boot up Linux if needed. I also had the Knoppix remaster called Quantian for scientific computing. Quantian had this cool feature called Mosix, that made it possible to connect computers that could share processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantian
Knoppix was the first Linux distro I ever tried back in the early 2000s. IIRC it was only a few hundred megs.
At the time it didn't have the overlayfs feature which often felt limiting since most directories were read only. Slax felt like a serious upgrade since you could install more packages after booting the CD.
I think Knoppix was the original live CD distro though?
Really liked Knoppix for a lot of things, though. Used to take it to the county used-sales office and boot the PCs they were selling to test for functionality and Linux compatibility.
Knoppix was useful when a linux box got hosed and would not boot for some reason. Boot into Knoppix, you have an easy root shell and almost all the tools you'd need to fix a broken system.
Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.
I used to use knoppix to rescue broken systems back in the day, including many a Windows machine. Always did what I needed it to. Glad to see it’s still around.
Exactly 20 years ago I bought a low-end laptop from a leading French online big-box store (RueDuCommerce.com). Instead of Windows the laptop came with a Linux CD. If only such discoveries were still possible today! The distro was Kanotix, a variant of Knoppix with better hardware support. I had been struggling with Suse and was bowled over by how much easier `apt` was. And that was how I came to use Debian and Ubuntu for two decades.
Kanotix was even better. Kano built on top of knoppix.
Lateron I think this was renamed to sidux, based on debian sid.
Been quite a while since I last used either though. Nowadays
most linux distribution .iso files work - they may not be as
adjusted as knoppix or kanotix but my use cases have changed.
I mostly use manjaro these days, it works quite well as base
system (I modify it anyway, so what I am using has only little
parts of manjaro left, mostly just the linux kernel and glibc,
rest I already compiled anew from source).
I started using Linux with Redhat but when they stopped doing the free version (sometime in the late 90's) I wanted to switch to Debian so I used Knoppix as a stepping stone to get there. Really made it easy. Then, somewhere around 2006 or 2007, I met Klaus Knopper and his wife at one of the Ubuntu developer summits. I think it was the one in Paris. Really nice guy and with the help of his wife, they did a lot of work to help people with vision impairment use Linux.
100%. The detection/configuration of hardware just worked out of the box. It's a must-have for a livecd and still a reeeealy nice-to-have for your permanent install back then.
I love that so many people have fond memories, and I assume it says something about the state of bootable linux distros that Knoppix is not as unique anymore.
Knoppix was my first experience with Linux over 20 years ago; my brother-in-law introduced me to it and it was really neat. "My computer isn't just Windows!"
Now with major distros offering live sessions in their installer, you can just hop into Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch.
I fixed a lot of Windows machines, especially partition issues, with Knoppix up until around 2014. I used to also use the wireless tools to detect rogue access points in hotels where my employer was providing internet access. Those were some good times, and helped me learn quite a bit about networking and security in general.
I had a lot of use for this for a few years, there was a window where I had my first laptop's hard drive die a horrible death, but I could not afford a replacement.
Enter Knoppix and persisting any state I cared about on a thumb drive.
Of course, since RAM was so limited on devices, just installing packages and leaving the modifications taking up valuable RAM was inconvenient to do, so I went down a rabbit hole of customizing the image builds with various nonsense.
Useful dozens of other times before Ubuntu popularized live images just being a thing you supplied as table stakes, but that window of going down a customization rabbit hole and running a diskless laptop is what I remember.
What a blast from the past. Seeing Knoppix on my room mate's PC in 2004 is what led to a 20+ year ongoing adventure with Linux, Debian, gaming on Linux, compiling games with a friggin compiler and automake, programming, it all started with that distro.
I was maybe 9 years old when I first used Linux, and it was with Knoppix and KDE. Loved early plasma. Arch is my thing these days, but KDE is still my DE of choice. Glad to see KHTML from Konquerer living in Blink and WebKit these days, too!
I used knoppix (and later SLAX) in high school to reboot shared computers (library, labs, etc) and then extract the SAM file from the C:\ drive. I would shuttle the file home on a USB stick and crack it overnight. After doing this on a handful of computers I ended up having virtually every teacher/admin password in the school, including the domain admin which was no shit all lowercase "north". The crack was so fast for weeks I thought it was a mistake and never even attempted to use it.
The most interesting thing was the patterns you could see with various teachers and pw reset policies. Some had themes like seasonal, others would take the current month and tack-on a number.
I ended up getting expelled for using that domain admin account to poke around. Had to transfer to a different school and was perma-banned from touching a computer for the rest of my time there. It ended up being a blessing in disguise, I had a lot more fun and grew up a lot at the other, larger high school. I still recall my guidance counselor helping me setup my classes for senior year... "ok, yeah and we'll put you in programming for your elective... OH WAIT... you aren't allowed to be anywhere near a computer, ceramics it is". Ceramics ended up being a blast!
Did you have to pretend a terminal was broken and call the domain admin or teacher over to log into it to get their credentials cached locally in that file in the first place?
I built a fake Novell login screen using VB6, it would save the users credentials to disk in plaintext, and then reboot, presenting the correct login screen which would work.
I ended up scraping a whole bunch of credentials, even teacher creds, but they were always permissioned. Math teacher had a single folder where math stuff was dumped but couldn't escape that.
One day we were sitting in one of the computer labs, and written on the board was just:
U: training
P: training
with no effort having been made to erase it.
That turned out to be effectively complete teacher level access. They couldn't decide what to do with a bunch of student teachers so just gave them unnamed creds with access to all subjects. And they left the account active for 12 months after the training program. By then, we had scavved up the credentials of a teacher who had been at the school since its inception, and thus had done every job and had the same sort of teacher god rights. His password was just redrocket or something silly.
I had exams, exam answers, notes on student performance, basically everything possible for 3 years. I am so glad there was no logging or anything sensible or I would have been expelled too.
Back in 2001 or so, I was studying in a college in another city, and traveled back home during breaks and on some weekends. On one occasion, I took a Knoppix mini-CD with me, repartitioned the hard drive on my mom's computer to cut a small ext2 partition for myself, installed Knoppix (there was a script to install it on HDD), set grub timeout to something like 1 second so no one would ever notice, and enjoyed my very own hidden Linux every time I visited home.
I'm pretty sure that if I manage to find that HDD, it will boot today.
Knoppix.net literally says this on their homepage:
> Knoppix.net is a resource for users, developers, and testers of Knoppix. The official website for Knoppix is on Klaus Knopper's website at knopper.net.
Such a well-done gateway to any aspiring linux users. I think it was 2000 when i first loaded a knoppix image. I couldn't believe the 'live' concept could work and you could just start full functioning browsers!
It was truly magical.
Oh wow, they are still around! I used to keep a Knoppix disk around for times when my desktop would run out of space and wouldn't boot (if I remember right). Boot it with Knoppix, delete some files, and then boot it normally!
My first efforts in cluster computing was Cluster Knoppix. I would go into the training lab with 25 PCs and boot them all into a single cluster. When I was done for the night it was an easy reboot back.
Knoppix used to have a really good desktop environment with effects and games. I think it had KDE with compiz-fusion. That was awesome. Now it's just bland lxde.
Isn't this what eventually became Kali linux? I remember Knoppix and Whoppix then I didn't really check on the projects for a while then Kali came along
I fondly remember Backtrack 2, running as a Live distro. I remember going to university labs where a teacher taught us a couple of techniques or so. Great days.
I remember burning this on a CD as a preteen. It's what got me into Linux. It blew my mind that an OS could be live-loaded off a disk. Ever since then, I tried to daily drive linux, but came back to Windows again and again for gaming...until this year.
I remember using PHLAK (Professional Hackers Linux Assault Kit) that I'm pretty sure was based on Knoppix. I don't know if PHLAK actually had any pedigree heading into Kali, but Kali stepped up when PHLAK stopped.
I loved live CDs. It was so magical at the time. I remember booting Backtrack (now called Kali Linux) in my university library and feeling like such a badass. Ubuntu started to come with a live CD and I remember when they merged the live CD and installer which meant you could use your computer to browse the web etc while it was installing. Good times.
Oh man, fond memories.
I remember being very interested in programming in middle/high school, but all the environments in our school computer lab had windows (this was in India), and I think at that time (maybe 2001-2003) I didn't even know there were other operating systems.
Our school was participating in something called International Cyber Olympiad, and of course I gave the eligibility exam.
They sent all students who passed a Knoppix Live CD to prepare for the actual competition. We did not have a PC at home until a couple of years later, but I used that CD in any PC I could find anywhere - the school computer lab, the school library computers, and my dad's office computers. It was my first experience with a Linux system (and I found it awesome). Also my first experience with gcc instead of borland c++.
Similar experience at my early uni days in UK - no PC at home and lugging around a heavy laptop wasnt so easy, so I had Slackware on a USB stick and would routinely go to the computer clusters to boot it up over the Windows mess they had.
The physics dept. was full of GNU evangelists, so thankfully they had real Linux machines. Everywhere else though, Microsoft had sunk its claws into
When I was a kid I got obsessed with Linux, but my family only had one PC in the living room. After an attempt to set up Windows/Linux dual boot where I messed up the partition table, my parents banned me from tinkering with it. Luckily I discovered Knoppix and other live distros, which allowed me to boot into a safe environment to play around in.
I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!
After that I always had a CD wallet thing with copies of sysresccd and supergrubdisk and others (including I think an old knoppix cd from a linux magazine).
Similar story here.
When I first started going towards Linux I tried, in this order:
* Puppy linux, because I liked puppies.
* College linux, because it was for education, and I was in secondary school, and college sounded fancy.
* Adriane Knoppix, because it's what came up when you did a web search for "knoppix download" -- that was interesting, if you didn't know, ADRIANE is for blind people.
* Whoppix (which became Whax) -- because I could actually find the download.
* Backtrack linux (because that was apparently better than WHAX)
* Slackware, because backtrack was based on this and "only script kiddies use Backtrack".
I did the same as you, tried to keep things to liveCDs but I always got the urge to install them, so would do it periodically until everything broke. This also meant I had to deal with whatever was broken (usually wifi).
One thing I remember very fondly though, which isn't a linux, is the leaked Geek Squad rescue CD... I'd give a decent chunk of change for an updated one of those..
did you have a copy of Hiren's in there?
I imagine that there are hundreds of us with very similar stories! I absolutely banjaxed our Windows partition after installing Mandrake or Suse or something on more than one occasion. I learned a lot about Linux, but probably more about the importance of backups haha.
Knoppix LiveCD in 2004 was my very first try at Linux. The fear of HDD partitioning my parents' PC delayed me from installing Ubuntu Warty by a few months.
I also first used Linux via knoppix around 2004. Great introduction. Though my big sister said it was difficult to install it to the hard drive because it's meant to be a live cd, but she managed to do it, .
I had a similar experience that led me to Knoppix when I was a kid. I was tinkering around with a hex editor and messed up the Windows MBR with it so I found and burned Knoppix to a disc at a library. I remember my mom complaining about things being... different
I also wanted to experiment with Linux at a young age, and so I tried booting it with LOADLIN[1]. I didn't know what I was doing, but I did successfully boot the kernel with a minimal rootfs! So minimal, it didn't have an init — which of course causes a quick kernel panic. Didn't yet have the know how to figure out what I was doing wrong. My mom asked "did you mess up the computer?" Nope, since with LOADLIN you didn't need to format.
Had to give up on that approach, but discovered Knoppix shortly afterwards, and that taught me Linux.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin
Same story! I discovered Porteus (based on slackware) and used it from a 8gb sandisk usb for years. It shipped with xfce and was a blast to tinker with. I learned to compile software from source for it because the package management was non-existent. Taught me a lot. AAAND it's still live: https://www.porteus.org
I used a Porteus boot USB a couple of years ago to rescue the secondary hard drive on my Dad's ancient Windows 7 PC. The drive had partially died, making it inaccessible under Windows -- but 99% of the disk was still readable with Linux's NTFS support. There was some glitch that caused the GUI to lock up shortly after booting about 80% of the time, but if I could make it to the console tty it worked like a charm!
Who among us hasn't gotten in trouble for screwing up the boot partition on the family computer while trying to install Linux? It's a badge of honor.
If Klaus Knopper or his wife Adriane finds this thread I want to say thank you for all the useful tools that you included in Knoppix. I learned so much and it was greatly simplified by the ease of operation of the live boot CD with its auto-detection of hardware. I really appreciate all the hard work that y'all have put into Knoppix over the years. I downloaded the latest version less than a month ago from knopper.net so that I can muck around on a new mini-pc and show an elderly relative how easy some of this stuff really is. Still an excellent toolset. Thanks!
In Grade 10 we'd pass around a Knoppix CD in the computer lab to boot up into something a bit more useful than the "Student Vista" locked down Windows XP machines.
I remember there being a sliding puzzle game in the theme of assembling molecules. I remember this because I remember a very classic argument between two teenagers over "propene" being a typo of "propane" vs. being an actual chemical. If only they were sitting in front of a device that could help them find the answer.
Katomic.
puppy linux on a live USB here :)
Puppy via USB was one of my first. My real first was SUSE distributed via CD-ROM in a GNU/Linux magazine. I used to run Puppy from not a usb drive but a hard drive in an external closure plugged into the USB port. I was a poor college kid and that's all I had.
Back in the day, we used Knoppix live CDs to wipe computers. One event literally resulted in this: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Shredder
(Leo is an amalgam of myself and another person as the story we submitted was modified for privacy reasons).
Knoppix 1.0 is still my first experience of linux that worked right out of the box. Forever gave me a fondness for live CD/DVD booting.
I remember a younger me being dazzled by the colored boot text. Good times!
Same here! I used it all the time back in the 2000s. I have fond memories of sliding a CD into an old desktop and using Linux.
Nice to see Knoppix featured here. This is basically the distro that pioneered the "Live CD" Linux where you can play with the full system without the need to commit to a full install. This was huge at a time where it was quite difficult for a non-technical user to install Linux. In addition, it was based on Debian, which at the time still was much more difficult to install than now, so for many people Knoppix was a way to use Debian without having to use that old installer. To top that, it used KDE.
Since then, a lot of Live Linux distros emerged, with various features offered; Debian got a much better installer; and then Knoppix dropped KDE Plasma as their desktop environment. All of that made me to move over to better "Live Linux" distros.
At one point in the very early 2000s my HDD failed and I was diskless for a while. I used Knoppix to be able to run things using a floppy to store my configs. I've been using Linux as daily driver ever since. The necessity to do a trial by fire made me pretty good at it and helped me in my professional life as well.
Thank you Knoppix.
Similar but with a 16mb usb drive for my settings and apps.
Ran pretty well since I only used an msn clone, web browser, occasional types assignment and some Winamp clone. Had an an external hdd for my media do it covered everything and just worked.
Boot times didn’t matter cuz it was so stable.
My setup was a Compaq Armada M300 laptop with a keyboard that was missing a few key caps, a battery that was shot to all hell and held only 5 minutes of charge, and a HDD that was completely broken.
I used a 128 MB USB stick for settings and my home directory, and had a Knoppix disc in the CD drive at all times.
It did indeed run pretty well, at least well enough for me to play around with it as a 14-15 year old kid and until I had finally saved up enough money to get me a new (used) 20GB HDD on eBay.
Good times. I kinda miss it.
I quickly learned to symlink certain things (usually the least-updated ones) to folders in $HOME, and put together some bash scripting to copy stuff back and forth. By the time I had a replacement disk I was already somewhat fluent. And yeah, hardly ever had to reboot, only when doing radical changes in setup. I remember I was using windowmaker instead of the default KDE 3 after a while, although I don't quite remember the thought process that led me to it.
Im my case I think it was, at the grub/lilo/syslinux prompt:
And a bunch of other options maybe.Ooh, didn't know it was possible to specify the desktop like that. Maybe I'll try it in a VM someday for fun.
Kinda wild that in primary/early middle school basically Knoppix and Wienux live distributions set me up for what has later become a career working with Linux/DevOps/SRE. Can't thank everyone who made Linux so accessible to people at a young age enough.
I remember a cool implementation detail about the earliest Knoppix version (don't remember which one) I had that was documented somewhere on that disc - when constructing a release filesystem image, the boot process was instrumented to get an ordered list of files being read. Then that list was fed into an image building program so when written to a CD, the files will be organized in an optimal order so a linear read with some readahead would get you a better boot time.
Super nostalgic for me just to see the name. My computing teacher gave me a Knoppix LiveCD when I was about 18 and I immediately fell in love with Linux. Within weeks I was (repeatedly) attempting to install Gentoo on my first computer that I built. What a wonderful project!
It took me a while to put it together why Knoppix rang a bell. It's probably been 20 years that I last used it, but fond memories indeed!
Fun to see this on the front page. I'm curious if ops intent was to share something cool is trigger a bunch of nostalgia because they definitely did the latter.
I remember using this when it first came out. It was a game changer for doing forensics back before full disk encryption was a common thing.
I frequently see things on HN where people just share the website of a well known project. I assume it's for people who legit never heard of it. Maybe they're younger. I think of a saying, every year a new generation discovers the Beatles for the first time.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Very nostalgic! I remember using this a few times around maybe 2005 when a Windows system got corrupted. Knoppix would boot from the CD and let you recover files from your HD. Loved it
I built a 40 (later 80) node cluster with clusterknoppix ~2006 to run a bunch of physics simulations off of old library computers after I replaced a bunch of PSU fans. Kept my cubicle toasty until we moved them into a random subterranean room I think was used for some early nuclear research at university.
Knoppix was basically the dawn of mass-market Linux, and I think it goes unsung. Installing Linux on a fresh computer, or even worse setting up dual boot, was way too much of a commitment to try it out. Knoppix gave us live CDs, and everybody who had been making excuses for years could test drive to their hearts content and find out it wasn't so hard.
It was certainly my Linux start. I'd been embarrassingly defying friends for years and sticking to Windows because I'm a creature of habit - thank god I jumped ship before Vista, when all my habits would have changed by force.
I think the 1-2 punch of Knoppix and Vista might be responsible for a significant portion of current Linux usage, at least in a Butterfly Effect way. People who were trying out Linux when Vista came had an easy escape hatch, and wouldn't have felt any urge to turn back until Windows had reverted to usable again.
When I would fix Windows machines for pocket change, Knoppix was one of the first tools I'd reach for. It made separating janky hardware and janky software much easier.
I hacked up a (not SMP-safe!) compressed loopback driver for a now-forgotten startup's "bootable business card" rescue disk. Over a year later I received an email from someone wanting to use it who was trying to port it forward.
When someone on my team started playing with this new Knoppix thing I was blown away: not just a rescue disk but a full-on distribution!
Moral: publish your hacks!
Hey, I found the email:
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 02:17:47 +0200 From: Klaus Knopper <knopper@linuxtag.de> To: Paul.Russell@linuxcare.com.au Subject: Compressed Loopback device Message-ID: <20000603021747.A17496@linuxtag.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i Sender: rusty@linuxcare.com.au
Hello Mr. Russel,
I'm trying to use your compressed loopback device as found on the LinuxCare rescue CD-Rom, for my selfconfiguring Linux distribution that runs entirely from CD (including XFree and KDE).
Unfortunately, the version that I got of the cloop device seems to act quite instable (of course I recompiled it for Kernel 2.2.15, which should not differ all too much from 2.2.14). I blame it on the fact that the file handle is being read from stdin of insmod, but it could be something different.
With an SMP-Kernel, cloop.o crashes immediately on insmod when calling fget(0). With a non-SMP kernel, it kills the kernel block buffer system, shutting down all other block devices as well, when accessing certain large files on an ext2 filesystem within the compressed block device file. It seems that the ll_rw_block() routine fails in that case, and wait_for_buffer() never returns, locking up something in the kernel block buffer management.
Do you maybe have a newer version of cloop that I can start working on? Btw, I found and fixed the bug in extract_compressed_fs.c, but I think it would really be nice if the sources for the whole package could be downloaded from LinuxCare somewhere without having to get the whole CD-Rom image.
If I find the cloop lockup-bug before you have time to answer, I will send a patch.
Regards
--- Klaus Knopper LinuxTag 2000 - Europes largest Linux Expohey, i am pretty sure i had that linuxcare business card cd in my wallet for some time. nice work.
This is a blast from the past. Knoppix saved my life a few times, it was the easiest way to mount a drive with a broken partition table or something else went that haywire with a dual-boot system. It was also the safest option for doing something on a public computer without leaving a trace (though back then NIC drivers were always a bit finicky).
My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.
Same there. The huge amount of software and geeky toys that came with it was impressive. From Emacs itself to the BB demo, libre games and whatnot.
You could install it to a hard disk and get a ready to use Debian Testing install with one of the best hardware autodetection settings ever.
I can second this. Very similar experience. Was a blast to see this pop up here.
Knoppix got really popular in Germany in the 2000s when it was still common that PC magazines were sold with CD-ROMs. Especially c't, Germany's most prestigious computer magazine, made Knoppix popular with their bootable Linux CDs for data rescue issues.
c't published articles about a few programs that I wrote (many years ago). They always sent me copies of the magazine with a CD when they did that. The CD had all the free/open source programs that were discussed in the magazine. Very good publisher.
I had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB hdd. or maybe it was later on my Pentium II with 128Meg and 6.4GB Fireball!
Either way I used it a good few times to rescue data and generally fiddle with all sort of pcs from this era. (late 90's to early 2000')
Same. Back then we weren't booting off USB memory sticks: CDs it was. Knoppix and memtest to troubleshoot friends and family's PCs were my go-to tools. Always had a few bootable CD roms in the car. Heck I'd even take a HDD with me and wouldn't hesitate to open other people's PC and hook my "rescue HDD".
Worst memory ever troubleshooting a friend's PC was in the 386 or 486 days (didn't have Knoppix yet but was already on Slackware): he asked me to backup his files and I hooked one of my HDD as the main (as it was booting fine) and hooked my friend's HDD as a "slave" (that's how the terminology was back then). But I got sloppy and just let my friend's HDD sitting on the tower. Metallic PC tower. I turned the computer on, we heard an horrible noise and we saw a puff of smoke.
Old HDDs were kinda wild from that standpoint: much more exposed conductive parts than the later ones.
I just managed to short-circuit his HDD and it, nearly literally, went up in smoke. I was feeling really bad and gave him a HDD of mine. Oh well at least he had a working computer (but zero files of his).
The usual solution to bad controller boards was finding the same model drive and swapping boards at least temporarily to get data off.
This worked for me, once. Putting drives in the freezer has worked 3x. I miss that... when an SSD dies it's just dead
I tried this with 2 drives in my life. 0/2 success rate.
For many years I had a Knoppix Live CD and later DVD/USB in my work bag, so that could boot up Linux if needed. I also had the Knoppix remaster called Quantian for scientific computing. Quantian had this cool feature called Mosix, that made it possible to connect computers that could share processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantian
Knoppix was the first Linux distro I ever tried back in the early 2000s. IIRC it was only a few hundred megs.
At the time it didn't have the overlayfs feature which often felt limiting since most directories were read only. Slax felt like a serious upgrade since you could install more packages after booting the CD.
I think Knoppix was the original live CD distro though?
I remember running live and then installing from Yggdrasil in the early 90s on 486 with 8MB RAM and 250MB hard disk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
Really liked Knoppix for a lot of things, though. Used to take it to the county used-sales office and boot the PCs they were selling to test for functionality and Linux compatibility.
Knoppix was useful when a linux box got hosed and would not boot for some reason. Boot into Knoppix, you have an easy root shell and almost all the tools you'd need to fix a broken system.
Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.
I used to use knoppix to rescue broken systems back in the day, including many a Windows machine. Always did what I needed it to. Glad to see it’s still around.
Exactly 20 years ago I bought a low-end laptop from a leading French online big-box store (RueDuCommerce.com). Instead of Windows the laptop came with a Linux CD. If only such discoveries were still possible today! The distro was Kanotix, a variant of Knoppix with better hardware support. I had been struggling with Suse and was bowled over by how much easier `apt` was. And that was how I came to use Debian and Ubuntu for two decades.
Kanotix was even better. Kano built on top of knoppix.
Lateron I think this was renamed to sidux, based on debian sid.
Been quite a while since I last used either though. Nowadays most linux distribution .iso files work - they may not be as adjusted as knoppix or kanotix but my use cases have changed. I mostly use manjaro these days, it works quite well as base system (I modify it anyway, so what I am using has only little parts of manjaro left, mostly just the linux kernel and glibc, rest I already compiled anew from source).
I started using Linux with Redhat but when they stopped doing the free version (sometime in the late 90's) I wanted to switch to Debian so I used Knoppix as a stepping stone to get there. Really made it easy. Then, somewhere around 2006 or 2007, I met Klaus Knopper and his wife at one of the Ubuntu developer summits. I think it was the one in Paris. Really nice guy and with the help of his wife, they did a lot of work to help people with vision impairment use Linux.
There was a time that this was the easiest way to install Debian.
100%. The detection/configuration of hardware just worked out of the box. It's a must-have for a livecd and still a reeeealy nice-to-have for your permanent install back then.
100%. Tell synaptic to find the best mirror and go.
I love that so many people have fond memories, and I assume it says something about the state of bootable linux distros that Knoppix is not as unique anymore.
Knoppix was my first experience with Linux over 20 years ago; my brother-in-law introduced me to it and it was really neat. "My computer isn't just Windows!"
Now with major distros offering live sessions in their installer, you can just hop into Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch.
I fixed a lot of Windows machines, especially partition issues, with Knoppix up until around 2014. I used to also use the wireless tools to detect rogue access points in hotels where my employer was providing internet access. Those were some good times, and helped me learn quite a bit about networking and security in general.
Klaus Knopper, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
I had a lot of use for this for a few years, there was a window where I had my first laptop's hard drive die a horrible death, but I could not afford a replacement.
Enter Knoppix and persisting any state I cared about on a thumb drive.
Of course, since RAM was so limited on devices, just installing packages and leaving the modifications taking up valuable RAM was inconvenient to do, so I went down a rabbit hole of customizing the image builds with various nonsense.
Useful dozens of other times before Ubuntu popularized live images just being a thing you supplied as table stakes, but that window of going down a customization rabbit hole and running a diskless laptop is what I remember.
What a blast from the past. Seeing Knoppix on my room mate's PC in 2004 is what led to a 20+ year ongoing adventure with Linux, Debian, gaming on Linux, compiling games with a friggin compiler and automake, programming, it all started with that distro.
I was maybe 9 years old when I first used Linux, and it was with Knoppix and KDE. Loved early plasma. Arch is my thing these days, but KDE is still my DE of choice. Glad to see KHTML from Konquerer living in Blink and WebKit these days, too!
I was a bit older but not by much. I used Knoppix to recover some data from my old Windows PC, great first contact with Linux.
I used knoppix (and later SLAX) in high school to reboot shared computers (library, labs, etc) and then extract the SAM file from the C:\ drive. I would shuttle the file home on a USB stick and crack it overnight. After doing this on a handful of computers I ended up having virtually every teacher/admin password in the school, including the domain admin which was no shit all lowercase "north". The crack was so fast for weeks I thought it was a mistake and never even attempted to use it.
The most interesting thing was the patterns you could see with various teachers and pw reset policies. Some had themes like seasonal, others would take the current month and tack-on a number.
I ended up getting expelled for using that domain admin account to poke around. Had to transfer to a different school and was perma-banned from touching a computer for the rest of my time there. It ended up being a blessing in disguise, I had a lot more fun and grew up a lot at the other, larger high school. I still recall my guidance counselor helping me setup my classes for senior year... "ok, yeah and we'll put you in programming for your elective... OH WAIT... you aren't allowed to be anywhere near a computer, ceramics it is". Ceramics ended up being a blast!
Did you have to pretend a terminal was broken and call the domain admin or teacher over to log into it to get their credentials cached locally in that file in the first place?
I built a fake Novell login screen using VB6, it would save the users credentials to disk in plaintext, and then reboot, presenting the correct login screen which would work.
I ended up scraping a whole bunch of credentials, even teacher creds, but they were always permissioned. Math teacher had a single folder where math stuff was dumped but couldn't escape that.
One day we were sitting in one of the computer labs, and written on the board was just:
U: training P: training
with no effort having been made to erase it.
That turned out to be effectively complete teacher level access. They couldn't decide what to do with a bunch of student teachers so just gave them unnamed creds with access to all subjects. And they left the account active for 12 months after the training program. By then, we had scavved up the credentials of a teacher who had been at the school since its inception, and thus had done every job and had the same sort of teacher god rights. His password was just redrocket or something silly.
I had exams, exam answers, notes on student performance, basically everything possible for 3 years. I am so glad there was no logging or anything sensible or I would have been expelled too.
Back in 2001 or so, I was studying in a college in another city, and traveled back home during breaks and on some weekends. On one occasion, I took a Knoppix mini-CD with me, repartitioned the hard drive on my mom's computer to cut a small ext2 partition for myself, installed Knoppix (there was a script to install it on HDD), set grub timeout to something like 1 second so no one would ever notice, and enjoyed my very own hidden Linux every time I visited home.
I'm pretty sure that if I manage to find that HDD, it will boot today.
Wait, I thought the official web page for Knoppix was <https://knoppix.net/>? What is this knopper.net?
Knoppix.net literally says this on their homepage:
> Knoppix.net is a resource for users, developers, and testers of Knoppix. The official website for Knoppix is on Klaus Knopper's website at knopper.net.
Such a well-done gateway to any aspiring linux users. I think it was 2000 when i first loaded a knoppix image. I couldn't believe the 'live' concept could work and you could just start full functioning browsers! It was truly magical.
My Polish middle school IT teacher was running a Knoppix on school computers and he showed me how to install it from live CD. Good times.
Knoppix: The OG. No AI was used.
This was the first Linux I used (mainly, to play Nibbles for Knoppix). The live-boot CD was a treasured belonging. Good times!
The number of times I rescued data off of broken Windows installations with Knoppix is BIG!
And, I always looked like the hero when I got someone's photos or important business data off to a USB key or similar.
As others have pointed out, not a surprise I ended up in DevOps/SRE given the above.
If you like Knoppix, Slitaz is also worth checking out. I think slitaz has more updated release at the moment.
Used to fix broken Gentoo builds, using it to chroot onto the drive.
Klaus Knopper is a hero for creating it. Clever guy.
Wow, it's been a while since I heard that name.
Knoppix saved my bacon a couple of times, I remember using their live CD.
Oh wow, they are still around! I used to keep a Knoppix disk around for times when my desktop would run out of space and wouldn't boot (if I remember right). Boot it with Knoppix, delete some files, and then boot it normally!
My first efforts in cluster computing was Cluster Knoppix. I would go into the training lab with 25 PCs and boot them all into a single cluster. When I was done for the night it was an easy reboot back.
Fun times
Fond memories of Knoppix from when I was younger. Many many thanks to the authors.
I remember using knoppix on some machine in the school computer room, to sniff everyone's logins using ettercap (pre https adoption). Good times.
Knoppix used to have a really good desktop environment with effects and games. I think it had KDE with compiz-fusion. That was awesome. Now it's just bland lxde.
compiz was amazing, I remember playing with the wobbly windows for hours
Isn't this what eventually became Kali linux? I remember Knoppix and Whoppix then I didn't really check on the projects for a while then Kali came along
Kali was Backtrack before which was built on Whax which was based on Slackware.
I fondly remember Backtrack 2, running as a Live distro. I remember going to university labs where a teacher taught us a couple of techniques or so. Great days.
I remember burning this on a CD as a preteen. It's what got me into Linux. It blew my mind that an OS could be live-loaded off a disk. Ever since then, I tried to daily drive linux, but came back to Windows again and again for gaming...until this year.
I remember using PHLAK (Professional Hackers Linux Assault Kit) that I'm pretty sure was based on Knoppix. I don't know if PHLAK actually had any pedigree heading into Kali, but Kali stepped up when PHLAK stopped.
There was a Knoppix STD (security tools distro), I remember using that in the mid/early 00s.
That's such an unfortunate name for a good, reputable distro.
This brings me back. Used the live cd (then later thumb drive) at my university whenever I needed to use the computers. Would just reboot into it.
https://s-t-d.org/
I really enjoyed the 'security tools distribution'
Loved Damn Small Linux, a Knoppix variant.
The OG live distro. This thing saved my butt on multiple occasions. I haven't even thought about it in a decade.
I feel a bit bad about that.
Always hated the screen saver on Knoppix. Otherwise a reasonably feature-rich liveboot OS, albeit not updated recently.
That's a blast from the past. I remember repairing my main install from a minimal Knoppix on my 1GB USB drive... Good old times.
The go-to live cd that helped me fix many Windows XP installs! Thanks for the memory.
I first thought there was something new about it
Brings back memories. One of my earlier Linux touch points. There was also this sibling Kanotix. Good times.
Nowadays, MX Linux seems to fill that gap with the Live USB remastering feature.
Oh man, I saved a lot of friends files from crashed windows with this. I was like a wizard.
I still have my copy of knoppix-std
GD I didn't expect to get teary eyed this early in the day
man i thought the guy died when i saw the post. glad he seems well. also he is surprisingly young.
When I was a teenager I always had Knoppix on a floppy disk in my bag to do illicit things on school computers :)
wow Knoppix. 2000 called and wanted their CD back
I have begged Klaus to update Knoopix. I'll send money.
GO FUND KLAUS.
PLEASE.
I've run it once
Omg great memories.
I loved live CDs. It was so magical at the time. I remember booting Backtrack (now called Kali Linux) in my university library and feeling like such a badass. Ubuntu started to come with a live CD and I remember when they merged the live CD and installer which meant you could use your computer to browse the web etc while it was installing. Good times.
ha! This was my first distro :)
I thought it was about those facny wire strippers. https://www.knipex.com/
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]