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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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')
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 69.2 ms ] threadAt 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 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.
My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.
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')
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.
Had to give up on that approach, but discovered Knoppix shortly afterwards, and that taught me Linux.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin
Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.