Knoppix
knopper.net
knopper.net
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++.
The physics dept. was full of GNU evangelists, so thankfully they had real Linux machines. Everywhere else though, Microsoft had sunk its claws into
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).
When I first started going towards Linux I tried, in this order:
* Puppy linux, because I liked puppies.
* College linux, because it was for education, and I was in secondary school, and college sounded fancy.
* Adriane Knoppix, because it's what came up when you did a web search for "knoppix download" -- that was interesting, if you didn't know, ADRIANE is for blind people.
* Whoppix (which became Whax) -- because I could actually find the download.
* Backtrack linux (because that was apparently better than WHAX)
* Slackware, because backtrack was based on this and "only script kiddies use Backtrack".
I did the same as you, tried to keep things to liveCDs but I always got the urge to install them, so would do it periodically until everything broke. This also meant I had to deal with whatever was broken (usually wifi).
One thing I remember very fondly though, which isn't a linux, is the leaked Geek Squad rescue CD... I'd give a decent chunk of change for an updated one of those..
Had to give up on that approach, but discovered Knoppix shortly afterwards, and that taught me Linux.
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.
(Leo is an amalgam of myself and another person as the story we submitted was modified for privacy reasons).
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.
Thank you Knoppix.
Ran pretty well since I only used an msn clone, web browser, occasional types assignment and some Winamp clone. Had an an external hdd for my media do it covered everything and just worked.
Boot times didn’t matter cuz it was so stable.
knoppix/linux (or any other kernel image) lang=es desktop=wmaker dma=on
I used a 128 MB USB stick for settings and my home directory, and had a Knoppix disc in the CD drive at all times.
It did indeed run pretty well, at least well enough for me to play around with it as a 14-15 year old kid and until I had finally saved up enough money to get me a new (used) 20GB HDD on eBay.
Good times. I kinda miss it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
When someone on my team started playing with this new Knoppix thing I was blown away: not just a rescue disk but a full-on distribution!
Moral: publish your hacks!
Hey, I found the email:
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 02:17:47 +0200 From: Klaus Knopper <knopper@linuxtag.de> To: Paul.Russell@linuxcare.com.au Subject: Compressed Loopback device Message-ID: <20000603021747.A17496@linuxtag.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i Sender: rusty@linuxcare.com.au
Hello Mr. Russel,
I'm trying to use your compressed loopback device as found on the LinuxCare rescue CD-Rom, for my selfconfiguring Linux distribution that runs entirely from CD (including XFree and KDE).
Unfortunately, the version that I got of the cloop device seems to act quite instable (of course I recompiled it for Kernel 2.2.15, which should not differ all too much from 2.2.14). I blame it on the fact that the file handle is being read from stdin of insmod, but it could be something different.
With an SMP-Kernel, cloop.o crashes immediately on insmod when calling fget(0). With a non-SMP kernel, it kills the kernel block buffer system, shutting down all other block devices as well, when accessing certain large files on an ext2 filesystem within the compressed block device file. It seems that the ll_rw_block() routine fails in that case, and wait_for_buffer() never returns, locking up something in the kernel block buffer management.
Do you maybe have a newer version of cloop that I can start working on? Btw, I found and fixed the bug in extract_compressed_fs.c, but I think it would really be nice if the sources for the whole package could be downloaded from LinuxCare somewhere without having to get the whole CD-Rom image.
If I find the cloop lockup-bug before you have time to answer, I will send a patch.
Regards
-Klaus KnopperAt 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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
Really liked Knoppix for a lot of things, though. Used to take it to the county used-sales office and boot the PCs they were selling to test for functionality and Linux compatibility.
Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.
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).
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.
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.
The most interesting thing was the patterns you could see with various teachers and pw reset policies. Some had themes like seasonal, others would take the current month and tack-on a number.
I ended up getting expelled for using that domain admin account to poke around. Had to transfer to a different school and was perma-banned from touching a computer for the rest of my time there. It ended up being a blessing in disguise, I had a lot more fun and grew up a lot at the other, larger high school. I still recall my guidance counselor helping me setup my classes for senior year... "ok, yeah and we'll put you in programming for your elective... OH WAIT... you aren't allowed to be anywhere near a computer, ceramics it is". Ceramics ended up being a blast!
I ended up scraping a whole bunch of credentials, even teacher creds, but they were always permissioned. Math teacher had a single folder where math stuff was dumped but couldn't escape that.
One day we were sitting in one of the computer labs, and written on the board was just:
U: training P: training
with no effort having been made to erase it.
That turned out to be effectively complete teacher level access. They couldn't decide what to do with a bunch of student teachers so just gave them unnamed creds with access to all subjects. And they left the account active for 12 months after the training program. By then, we had scavved up the credentials of a teacher who had been at the school since its inception, and thus had done every job and had the same sort of teacher god rights. His password was just redrocket or something silly.
I had exams, exam answers, notes on student performance, basically everything possible for 3 years. I am so glad there was no logging or anything sensible or I would have been expelled too.
I'm pretty sure that if I manage to find that HDD, it will boot today.
> 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.
Knoppix saved my bacon a couple of times, I remember using their live CD.
Klaus Knopper is a hero for creating it. Clever guy.
And, I always looked like the hero when I got someone's photos or important business data off to a USB key or similar.
As others have pointed out, not a surprise I ended up in DevOps/SRE given the above.
Fun times
I really enjoyed the 'security tools distribution'
I feel a bit bad about that.
I first thought there was something new about it
GO FUND KLAUS.
PLEASE.