Knoppix(knopper.net) |
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).
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.
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.
Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.
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')
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).
My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.
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.
> 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.
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?