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).<p>Like some commenters say, it was both a "safe" gateway to Linux, and a lifesaver when hard disks refused to work properly.
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, now theres a name I havent heard in a long time.<p>Booting off a live cd. The future in the early naughies.<p>Well maybe not the future, but cool, and very useful.
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!<p>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.<p>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 ( <a href="http://prrescue.prnet.org/index.php/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://prrescue.prnet.org/index.php/Main_Page</a> ) to be able to mount partitions of the devices that weren't able to boot anymore (I usually use nilfs2 for the root partition).
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.<p>[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloop</a>
[1]<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop" rel="nofollow">https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cloop</a>
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!