
Knoppix 8.5.0 Released - bjoko
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix850-en.html
======
gordaco
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.

~~~
geofft
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,...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=knoppix,ubuntu)

~~~
mbubb
yes - specifically the 'livecd'

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

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benj111
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.

~~~
geezerjay
Knoppix was instrumental to lower the barrier to entry for those curious about
that whole new linux thing but scared to screw their windows installation.

~~~
usrusr
A worthy present-day update this way of lowering the barrier of entry would be
a convenient, pre-configured way of running the same persistent set of
configuration state and user home from either a boot media start or within a
virtualized environment. Virtual container with optional full reboot. Does
something like this exist?

~~~
lathiat
You can basically just install an OS on a USB key (or HDD) these days. Which
solves that problem.

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

~~~
bluedino
They still sell them in the USA (I think the magazines are of European
origins) and they come with an “ecodvd”

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josteink
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.

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zepearl
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
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.

------
ajuc
Also known as Everybody's First Linux.

~~~
na85
Mine was actually Gentoo. It was a fucking brutal experience.

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proctor
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
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
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.

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sanqui
Knoppix still uses Reiserfs?

~~~
Jedd
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.

~~~
simcop2387
It does (did?) Have a very serious bug with fsck though. If you have an image
of a resierfs file system on a reisferfs filesystem the fsck would merge the
two like a maniac leaving the whole thing broken. This meant that it isn't
suitable for virtual machines, disk image backups, or other similar
situations. I hit that one a few times and it made me switch to ext3 once it
was stable.

~~~
Jedd
An image as in a dd of another file system? That's a pretty serious bug - I'm
wondering how it'd even find that, if it's searching its b-tree. This sounds
like it's going past file system / meta data and looking at file content.

I can't imagine why a fsck tool would dive into payload like that - do you
have some more information about this bug, as I can't find reference to it.
Most of my residual reiserfs boxes are VM's themselves, so I'm unlikely to hit
it, but some mitigation would be comforting.

~~~
simcop2387
> An image as in a dd of another file system? That's a pretty serious bug -
> I'm wondering how it'd even find that, if it's searching its b-tree. This
> sounds like it's going past file system / meta data and looking at file
> content.

Yep exactly that. The whole reason it did it was that it sometimes needed to
recover from a corrupted b-tree but it leaves enough markers around that it
could rebuild the b-tree by scanning all the blocks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS#fsck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS#fsck)

I can't find a better link at the moment, the lkml link on wikipedia is dead
and it's hard to search for, but at the time it was well known for this kind
of bug.

EDIT:

Until I learned about that bug (the hard way at first) the ability of it to
rebuild itself after a problem like that was actually incredibly useful, it'd
recover really nicely from a bad disk, finding just what it could manage to
find.

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

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lessclue
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.

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aioprisan
"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!

