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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

I see this predates Knoppix.

What did Knoppix get right that this got wrong, to the point where Knoppix quickly became synonymous with live-distrubution?

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I've used finnix forever as my go to live recovery distro, and have never heard of knoppix.

From a cursory search, it appears that finnix is focused on the command line while knoppix provides a desktop environment. Don't most distros offer live boot environments these days? I know I've done this with Fedora, Debian, Suse, and Alpine at least..

> From a cursory search, it appears that finnix is focused on the command line while knoppix provides a desktop environment

if knoppix was one of the first live distros to offer a full desktop environment, that's definitely what they got right.

Yeah, in my book (used Knoppix, never heard of or don't remember Finnix), Knoppix had 2 uses: restore systems but primarily try out if Linux worked on an unknown PC. And also run Linux on Windows PCs at school.

> Don't most distros offer live boot environments these days?

That wasn't a thing in 2007.

> On 23 October 2005, Finnix 86.0 was released. Earlier unreleased versions (84, and 85.0 through 85.3) were "Knoppix remasters", with support for Linux LVM and dm-crypt being the main reason for creation. However, 86.0 was a departure from Knoppix, and was derived directly from the Debian "testing" tree.[7]

My reading of this is that early versions of Finnix were based on Knoppix. However, according to the wikipedia sidebars, the initial release of Knoppix was 30 September 2000, while the initial release of Finnix was March 22, 2000. Something something beta/pre-release versions?

From the Wikipedia article:

> Finnix 0.01 was based on Red Hat Linux 6.0, and was created to help with administration and recovery of other Linux workstations around Finnie's office.[citation needed] The first public release of Finnix was 0.03, and was released in early 2000, based on an updated Red Hat Linux 6.1.

So it seems that it was based on Knoppix later

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say compression. Knopper picked up and became maintainer of a kernel module called "cloop" that supports zlib-compressed loopback filesystems.

If Knoppix had this and Finnix didn't, or if Knopper was able to supply enhancements and bugfixes in order to support Knoppix releases, then he was likely able to fit a much more complete system onto a given CD or DVD.

But idk what kind of compression early Finnix used, if any. (Nowadays, everything uses SquashFS, right?)

I used to have a Knoppix disc signed by Klaus Knopper. Wonder what happened to that one..

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