Knoppix

StackBPoppin

Isn't this what eventually became Kali linux? I remember Knoppix and Whoppix then I didn't really check on the projects for a while then Kali came along

rivetfasten

Knoppix was the first Linux distro I ever tried back in the early 2000s. IIRC it was only a few hundred megs. At 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?

parasti

What a blast from the past. Seeing Knoppix on my room mate's PC in 2004 is what led to a 20+ year ongoing adventure with Linux, Debian, gaming on Linux, compiling games with a friggin compiler and automake, programming, it all started with that distro.

Waterluvian

In Grade 10 we'd pass around a Knoppix CD in the computer lab to boot up into something a bit more useful than the "Student Vista" locked down Windows XP machines. 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.

nmfisher

This is a blast from the past. Knoppix saved my life a few times, it was the easiest way to mount a drive with a broken partition table or something else went that haywire with a dual-boot system. It was also the safest option for doing something on a public computer without leaving a trace (though back then NIC drivers were always a bit finicky). My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.

jaffa2

I had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB hdd. or maybe it was later on my Pentium II with 128Meg and 6.4GB Fireball! 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')

lgeorget

That's a blast from the past. I remember repairing my main install from a minimal Knoppix on my 1GB USB drive... Good old times.

hit8run

Brings back memories. One of my earlier Linux touch points. There was also this sibling Kanotix. Good times.

niko323

Knoppix: The OG. No AI was used.

seanclayton

I was maybe 9 years old when I first used Linux, and it was with Knoppix and KDE. Loved early plasma. Arch is my thing these days, but KDE is still my DE of choice. Glad to see KHTML from Konquerer living in Blink and WebKit these days, too!

officeplant

Knoppix 1.0 is still my first experience of linux that worked right out of the box. Forever gave me a fondness for live CD/DVD booting.

horticulturist

I used to use knoppix to rescue broken systems back in the day, including many a Windows machine. Always did what I needed it to. Glad to see it’s still around.

tnelsond4

Knoppix used to have a really good desktop environment with effects and games. I think it had KDE with compiz-fusion. That was awesome. Now it's just bland lxde.

doener

Knoppix got really popular in Germany in the 2000s when it was still common that PC magazines were sold with CD-ROMs. Especially c't, Germany's most prestigious computer magazine, made Knoppix popular with their bootable Linux CDs for data rescue issues.

prpl

I built a 40 (later 80) node cluster with clusterknoppix ~2006 to run a bunch of physics simulations off of old library computers after I replaced a bunch of PSU fans. Kept my cubicle toasty until we moved them into a random subterranean room I think was used for some early nuclear research at university.

kmeaw

I remember a cool implementation detail about the earliest Knoppix version (don't remember which one) I had that was documented somewhere on that disc - when constructing a release filesystem image, the boot process was instrumented to get an ordered list of files being read. Then that list was fed into an image building program so when written to a CD, the files will be organized in an optimal order so a linear read with some readahead would get you a better boot time.

teddyh

Wait, I thought the official web page for Knoppix was < https://knoppix.net/ >? What is this knopper.net?

zer0zzz

Klaus Knopper, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

throwaway2016a

Fun to see this on the front page. I'm curious if ops intent was to share something cool is trigger a bunch of nostalgia because they definitely did the latter. 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.

Curiositry

This was the first Linux I used (mainly, to play Nibbles for Knoppix). The live-boot CD was a treasured belonging. Good times!