Knoppix 8.5.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Knoppix 8.5.0 Released

knopper.net

135 pointsbjoko50 comments

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.

I didn't have a CD burner, so I had it on ~11 floppy disks.

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.

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.

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,...

yes - specifically the 'livecd'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

That's right.

Nowadays many linux CDs/DVDs/USB sticks start by booting into a live system, and then offer you to install it.

Back in the days when Knoppix was popular, the major distros only had normal installers, so you needed a free partition for installation (or resize an existing windows partition to make room, which was very risky).

As a 9 year old in late 2000, Knoppix was my introduction to Linux. I wasn't asked to install Linux on the family computer (not that I knew how to).

I don't remember how I first heard about Linux or Knoppix but I do remember those first magical moments using it. While I've had many influences Knoppix definitely was an early influence on my tech interests because it was so easy to start.

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?

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

There is also a games version with quite a few games.

I still routinely use Nomad-BSD for poking about of machines... and my FreeNAS boots from a USB stick.

In the early 2000 it was THE "tool" of choice for my IT support job.

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.

Also, the internet

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.

Never heard of it, but it sounds really usable.

Thanks for the tip!

That sounds super useful! I wish it was free software and available in F-Droid though. Looks like the normal version even has ads.

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

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

Exactly ! I received Knoppix with some magazines I purchased in a kiosk near school, seems a century 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.

Knoppix always missed the nilfs2-module & userland utility => I always ended up using PR Rescue ( 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).

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.

Also known as Everybody's First Linux.

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

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.

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 [1]https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop

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

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.

Knoppix still uses Reiserfs?

After he murdered his wife they dropped it

Why?

Development got really slow. Developer was tangled up in some small personal issues.

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).

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.

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. :-(

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.

I heard that it was renamed to KillerFS

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

"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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com