Knoppix

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++.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Omg great memories.

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 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.

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.

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')

There was a time that this was the easiest way to install Debian.

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.

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 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 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.

If you like Knoppix, Slitaz is also worth checking out. I think slitaz has more updated release at the moment.

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.

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.

This was the first Linux I used (mainly, to play Nibbles for Knoppix). The live-boot CD was a treasured belonging. Good times!

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!

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

Fond memories of Knoppix from when I was younger. Many many thanks to the authors.

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?

Wait, I thought the official web page for Knoppix was <https://knoppix.net/>? What is this knopper.net?

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.

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.

Knoppix: The OG. No AI was used.

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

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.

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.

Klaus Knopper, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

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.

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.

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).

Brings back memories. One of my earlier Linux touch points. There was also this sibling Kanotix. Good times.

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