Knoppix

I’ve had some fun playing with the most recent Knoppix Live-CD. It’s a “live” Linux installation on a bootable CD-Rom.

I download the image, burned it to disc, and booted off of it. It autodetected all my hardware and network settings, so within a few minutes I had a very useable desktop, including Mozilla, Gaim, and OpenOffice.

To be fair, my Knoppix session crashed/hung after a few hours, but since it’s all on CD, there’s not much chance for damage.

This is a nice way to “show someone Linux”, and it’s also useful as a recovery CD, or as an emergency “must get online to download fixes for this broken/infected WinXP machine” CD.

If you’ve not used Linux and you’re interested, this is a good way to try it out. The LiveCD method puts you in a nice “sandbox”, so you can’t break your existing OS/installation unless you try very hard.

The new 3.2 supposedly supports “persistent home directories”, which lets you save your Knoppix config info on some mounted volume, but I haven’t tried this yet.