13 ms·

Knoppix 8.5.0 Released

135 points by bjoko 8y ago

gordaco 8y ago
I don't think I have heard anything about Knoppix in the last 10 years or so, and it's such a pity. This was the first Linux I used at home, back in 2003. I had to use both a CD and a floppy to boot it, IIRC (apparently certain older BIOS didn't allow booting from CD at the time, but I might be wrong). Like some commenters say, it was both a "safe" gateway to Linux, and a lifesaver when hard disks refused to work properly.
- Ocerge 8y ago
  Yep, I had a couple of CD sleeves filled with Knoppix and Mandrake somewhere around 2003. I was ~13 and had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but it felt fun anyway.
- joombaga 8y ago
  I didn't have a CD burner, so I had it on ~11 floppy disks.
- ehnto 8y ago
  Likewise, although the boot cd alone worked for me. I remember booting it up on the school PCs and feeling super deviant. It definitely helped me on my journey to linux as a daily driver.
- JJMcJ 8y ago
  My experience as well. Boot off a floppy, external disk drive because the one PC we had at the time was shared so I didn't want to mess with the boot or partitioning. I got a lot done with that setup.
- geofft 8y ago
  Knoppix is basically a Debian derivative with good live CD support, and Ubuntu filled that role very well once it got started. It's one of the mixed blessings of free software that if a project does something well, it's easy to see what it does and clone it. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=knoppix,ubuntu https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=knoppix,...
  - mbubb 8y ago
    yes - specifically the 'livecd'
josteink 8y ago
I have fond memories of Knoppix from the time before most Linux installation-CDs also doubles as their own live-CDs. It was a life saver more than once! But as most distros started providing this on their own, my need for Knoppix has completely disappeared, and last time I tried it, it appeared broken. I guess you could say they are the victim of their own success, by popularizing live-CDs as a thing.
sanqui 8y ago
Knoppix still uses Reiserfs?
- xparco 8y ago
  After he murdered his wife they dropped it
  - lugg 8y ago
    Why?
    - sambull 8y ago
      Development got really slow. Developer was tangled up in some small personal issues.
      - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        I guess you're being humorous, but it was a completed and widely used system. IIRC it was default for Slackware (which I guess was quite niche).
        lostapathy 8y ago
        Reiserfs wasn’t quite complete - if it got heavily fragmented, you had to backup, reformat, and copy your data back. Unfortunately ... if you let it ride much above 80% disk usage for very long (or less time the fuller it got) it would fragment bad and the performance just fell off a cliff bad.
        Rondom 8y ago
        SUSE had it as default as well. Quite sad that it was tied so much to the main creator's personality and "private issues" kind of sealed the fate of it. :-(
- Jedd 8y ago
  Heck, I still have a bunch of systems that use reiserfs -- it's rock solid, I very rarely have issues with it. It's a real shame the name was tied to the original / primary author, as the other developers are doubtless exceedingly competent & capable. Had Hans given the file system a more generic name I suspect it (the fs) would have thrived despite his personal activities.
benj111 8y ago
Knoppix, now theres a name I havent heard in a long time. Booting off a live cd. The future in the early naughies. Well maybe not the future, but cool, and very useful.
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  I put Linux on my computers in ~2011 using live disks from LinuxFormat magazine I think. It made the install and transition so easy and it was helpful when I started using Linux professionally (spend several hours a week in a terminal). They still sell LinuxFormat at my local bookstore and it still comes with live disks. So it is only now becoming less relevant now that CD/DVD drives are becoming less of a thing.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    Also, the internet
  - firmgently 8y ago
    Reading these comments I feel obliged to mention the Android app 'DriveDroid' which lets you store multiple disk images on your phone and then acts as a bootable USB disk. I've got GParted, CloneZilla, Alpine, Debian etc live disks always in my pocket. All I need is a micro-usb cable (which most modern homes seem to have laying around) to boot into various OSs and tools. No affiliation, I just think it's a cool free app and it's proven very handy for me loads of times.
    - zyberzero 8y ago
      Never heard of it, but it sounds really usable. Thanks for the tip!
    - gloflo 8y ago
      That sounds super useful! I wish it was free software and available in F-Droid though. Looks like the normal version even has ads.
- geezerjay 8y ago
aioprisan 8y ago
"The KNOPPIX Live System starts and runs about factor 5 faster from USB flash disk than from CD or DVD!" May just give this a shot with a USB drive now!
knolan 8y ago
Many a PhD was rescued with Knoppix. So many people never made backups and so many shitty Dells died during the lifetime of so many of my cohort’s studies. Fortunately I was able to get their data back but nobody seemed to learn. This was around the time that external hard drives dropped to €1/GB and well before Dropbox.
- swozey 8y ago
  Knoppix was also the "rescue disk" at every single webhost/datacenter I've worked in. Lots of educational material saved over the years.
Droobfest 8y ago
The biggest surprise for me is that there still exists german magazines that distribute dvd's with their print editions.
- bluedino 8y ago
  They still sell them in the USA (I think the magazines are of European origins) and they come with an “ecodvd”
- gabrielblack 8y ago
  Exactly ! I received Knoppix with some magazines I purchased in a kiosk near school, seems a century ago.
zepearl 8y ago
Knoppix always missed the nilfs2-module & userland utility => I always ended up using PR Rescue ( http://prrescue.prnet.org/index.php/Main_Page http://prrescue.prnet.org/index.php/Main_Page ) to be able to mount partitions of the devices that weren't able to boot anymore (I usually use nilfs2 for the root partition).
- muxator 8y ago
  Wow, now that sounds interesting. I think I never, ever heard about nilfs2 since the times it was mainlined (circa 2005). Altough interesting, I sincerely thought it was stale and destined to oblivion. Care to describe why you prefer it? Personally, I'm all in with btrfs (another niche FS nowadays), and I am very happy about it.
proctor 8y ago
the cloop[0] system from knoppix is something i use often to back up arbitrary file systems. debian has the cloop-utils which includes create_compressed_fs, and this is great for making compressed copies of file systems which can then be read without uncompressing the whole blob. however i have found debian's cloop-src module to be problematic in that i have never been able to get it to compile. the actual module comes as source only, and without this part it is not possible to read the backups without uncompressing, which is a shame. in fact it appears debian has recently removed cloop from debian testing[1] for this reason. so it is still necessary (and enjoyable) to have knoppix around to use the decompression system, although it is a huge pain to do it this way. i hope debian is able to get things sorted finally with cloop-src! that would be great. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop [1]https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop
- hawski 8y ago
  What advantages does cloop have over squashfs? Quick search revealed only that cloop is slower and has a bit worse compression than squashfs [0]. [0] https://elinux.org/Squash_Fs_Comparisons https://elinux.org/Squash_Fs_Comparisons
  - proctor 8y ago
    the difference that i find valuable is that cloop is not a file system, whereas squashfs is. this means that i can use cloop to compress _any_ file system at the block level. very useful as a sys-admin.
ajuc 8y ago
Also known as Everybody's First Linux.
- na85 8y ago
  Mine was actually Gentoo. It was a fucking brutal experience.
- tuxxy 8y ago
  Haha I thought I was alone in that. I was eight years old in 2004-2005 and my brother had brought it home from his job as an IT person of some sort. Been hooked on using GNU/Linux since then.
fareesh 8y ago
Knoppix, now there's a name I haven't heard in a very long time!
lessclue 8y ago
Whoa, haven’t heard that name in 15 years. Remember downloading an ISO over slow DSL at an Internet cafe to (of course) do a live boot and rescue files from a botched HD.

135 points by bjoko 8y ago

I don't think I have heard anything about Knoppix in the last 10 years or so, and it's such a pity. This was the first Linux I used at home, back in 2003. I had to use both a CD and a floppy to boot it, IIRC (apparently certain older BIOS didn't allow booting from CD at the time, but I might be wrong). Like some commenters say, it was both a "safe" gateway to Linux, and a lifesaver when hard disks refused to work properly.

Ocerge 8y ago
Yep, I had a couple of CD sleeves filled with Knoppix and Mandrake somewhere around 2003. I was ~13 and had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but it felt fun anyway.
joombaga 8y ago
I didn't have a CD burner, so I had it on ~11 floppy disks.
ehnto 8y ago
Likewise, although the boot cd alone worked for me. I remember booting it up on the school PCs and feeling super deviant. It definitely helped me on my journey to linux as a daily driver.
JJMcJ 8y ago
My experience as well. Boot off a floppy, external disk drive because the one PC we had at the time was shared so I didn't want to mess with the boot or partitioning. I got a lot done with that setup.
geofft 8y ago
Knoppix is basically a Debian derivative with good live CD support, and Ubuntu filled that role very well once it got started. It's one of the mixed blessings of free software that if a project does something well, it's easy to see what it does and clone it. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=knoppix,ubuntu https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=knoppix,...
- mbubb 8y ago
  yes - specifically the 'livecd'

josteink 8y ago

I have fond memories of Knoppix from the time before most Linux installation-CDs also doubles as their own live-CDs. It was a life saver more than once! But as most distros started providing this on their own, my need for Knoppix has completely disappeared, and last time I tried it, it appeared broken. I guess you could say they are the victim of their own success, by popularizing live-CDs as a thing.

sanqui 8y ago

Knoppix still uses Reiserfs?

xparco 8y ago
After he murdered his wife they dropped it
- lugg 8y ago
  Why?
  - sambull 8y ago
    Development got really slow. Developer was tangled up in some small personal issues.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      I guess you're being humorous, but it was a completed and widely used system. IIRC it was default for Slackware (which I guess was quite niche).
      - lostapathy 8y ago
        Reiserfs wasn’t quite complete - if it got heavily fragmented, you had to backup, reformat, and copy your data back. Unfortunately ... if you let it ride much above 80% disk usage for very long (or less time the fuller it got) it would fragment bad and the performance just fell off a cliff bad.
      - Rondom 8y ago
        SUSE had it as default as well. Quite sad that it was tied so much to the main creator's personality and "private issues" kind of sealed the fate of it. :-(
Jedd 8y ago
Heck, I still have a bunch of systems that use reiserfs -- it's rock solid, I very rarely have issues with it. It's a real shame the name was tied to the original / primary author, as the other developers are doubtless exceedingly competent & capable. Had Hans given the file system a more generic name I suspect it (the fs) would have thrived despite his personal activities.

benj111 8y ago

Knoppix, now theres a name I havent heard in a long time. Booting off a live cd. The future in the early naughies. Well maybe not the future, but cool, and very useful.

4thaccount 8y ago
I put Linux on my computers in ~2011 using live disks from LinuxFormat magazine I think. It made the install and transition so easy and it was helpful when I started using Linux professionally (spend several hours a week in a terminal). They still sell LinuxFormat at my local bookstore and it still comes with live disks. So it is only now becoming less relevant now that CD/DVD drives are becoming less of a thing.
- sjwright 8y ago
  Also, the internet
- firmgently 8y ago
  Reading these comments I feel obliged to mention the Android app 'DriveDroid' which lets you store multiple disk images on your phone and then acts as a bootable USB disk. I've got GParted, CloneZilla, Alpine, Debian etc live disks always in my pocket. All I need is a micro-usb cable (which most modern homes seem to have laying around) to boot into various OSs and tools. No affiliation, I just think it's a cool free app and it's proven very handy for me loads of times.
  - zyberzero 8y ago
    Never heard of it, but it sounds really usable. Thanks for the tip!
  - gloflo 8y ago
    That sounds super useful! I wish it was free software and available in F-Droid though. Looks like the normal version even has ads.
geezerjay 8y ago

aioprisan 8y ago

"The KNOPPIX Live System starts and runs about factor 5 faster from USB flash disk than from CD or DVD!" May just give this a shot with a USB drive now!

knolan 8y ago

Many a PhD was rescued with Knoppix. So many people never made backups and so many shitty Dells died during the lifetime of so many of my cohort’s studies. Fortunately I was able to get their data back but nobody seemed to learn. This was around the time that external hard drives dropped to €1/GB and well before Dropbox.

swozey 8y ago
Knoppix was also the "rescue disk" at every single webhost/datacenter I've worked in. Lots of educational material saved over the years.

Droobfest 8y ago

The biggest surprise for me is that there still exists german magazines that distribute dvd's with their print editions.

bluedino 8y ago
They still sell them in the USA (I think the magazines are of European origins) and they come with an “ecodvd”
gabrielblack 8y ago
Exactly ! I received Knoppix with some magazines I purchased in a kiosk near school, seems a century ago.

zepearl 8y ago

Knoppix always missed the nilfs2-module & userland utility => I always ended up using PR Rescue ( http://prrescue.prnet.org/index.php/Main_Page http://prrescue.prnet.org/index.php/Main_Page ) to be able to mount partitions of the devices that weren't able to boot anymore (I usually use nilfs2 for the root partition).

muxator 8y ago
Wow, now that sounds interesting. I think I never, ever heard about nilfs2 since the times it was mainlined (circa 2005). Altough interesting, I sincerely thought it was stale and destined to oblivion. Care to describe why you prefer it? Personally, I'm all in with btrfs (another niche FS nowadays), and I am very happy about it.

proctor 8y ago

the cloop[0] system from knoppix is something i use often to back up arbitrary file systems. debian has the cloop-utils which includes create_compressed_fs, and this is great for making compressed copies of file systems which can then be read without uncompressing the whole blob. however i have found debian's cloop-src module to be problematic in that i have never been able to get it to compile. the actual module comes as source only, and without this part it is not possible to read the backups without uncompressing, which is a shame. in fact it appears debian has recently removed cloop from debian testing[1] for this reason. so it is still necessary (and enjoyable) to have knoppix around to use the decompression system, although it is a huge pain to do it this way. i hope debian is able to get things sorted finally with cloop-src! that would be great. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop [1]https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop

hawski 8y ago
What advantages does cloop have over squashfs? Quick search revealed only that cloop is slower and has a bit worse compression than squashfs [0]. [0] https://elinux.org/Squash_Fs_Comparisons https://elinux.org/Squash_Fs_Comparisons
- proctor 8y ago
  the difference that i find valuable is that cloop is not a file system, whereas squashfs is. this means that i can use cloop to compress _any_ file system at the block level. very useful as a sys-admin.

ajuc 8y ago

Also known as Everybody's First Linux.

na85 8y ago
Mine was actually Gentoo. It was a fucking brutal experience.
tuxxy 8y ago
Haha I thought I was alone in that. I was eight years old in 2004-2005 and my brother had brought it home from his job as an IT person of some sort. Been hooked on using GNU/Linux since then.

fareesh 8y ago

Knoppix, now there's a name I haven't heard in a very long time!

lessclue 8y ago

Whoa, haven’t heard that name in 15 years. Remember downloading an ISO over slow DSL at an Internet cafe to (of course) do a live boot and rescue files from a botched HD.