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Klaus Knopper, Creator of Knoppix Talks to DistroWatch
An anonymous reader wrote to us about an interview with Klaus Knopper the author/creator of Knoppix. Knoppix is "a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. "
In other words, was there any redeeming factors Debian had over any other distribution?
Join the TWIT army now!
I love the way he says he designed the hardware autodetection. He just made a list of al the steps you do to setup a linux install's hardware and automated it and threw in some kudzu. Genius.
Why not fork?
I have been wanting a linux dist to use on an NT 4.0 box, and this one has been great. I pop the CD in and (Ta-Da) its a linux box. I then SAMBA mount my other computer and life it good. It allows me to work in linux without messing with my NT 4 environment so I can use it when needed.
Thanks.
Not really - it is just more flexible and useful than windows.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
Hacker friendly or Cracker friendly?
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
to try it out. Haven't come round to it yet, but it might be very useful to play those movies on any system anywhere, granted this hardware detection and video card support is as good as it should be.
The problem lies in the insecurity of NT security, not the versatility of linux. Also, any secure computer shouldn't allow a user to boot from removable media. Furthermore, if a "hacker" can gain physical access to a computer then that is the security failure, not the software the system runs.
...and it doesn't really matter whether the program is on Knoppix, it is small enough to fit on a floppy.
The utility is not for "hackers", it can be quite useful for restoring a system when someone forgets the admin password.
2) There's a friendly boot disk that has all the tools to reset admin passwords on a single floppy: http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.h tml - it works well, I've used it on a box at work we could not otherwise access.
2) Not that Knoppix has this, but why would this be a dangerous addition? You can reset the admin password by editing a single file - the boot disk above just makes it a snap. If we start eliminating utilities in the name of preventing "hackers" from abusing them, then we might as well disable shell, network, and disk access as well.
Not mentioned in the Slashdot article, but most of the software in the Knoppix package is released under the GPL, and Knoppix itself is completely free. This is one of the reasons that this Linux bootdisk is such a big deal.
-Kaos
Our linux users group was introduced to Knoppix by a visiting member from Germany about a year ago. Last spring we held an installfest and the knoppix cd's that we gave out were a huge hit. Best of all, it means that we were able to give out a VERY nice functional test cd that we knew had an almost zero chance of harming an individuals computer. If you have anybody who you've wanted to have try linux or has expressed an interest in linux but is nervous about putting something on the hard drive, knoppix is definitely worth burning a copy of for them.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
WHY do I have to go through xf86config to get my distro up and running???? You gotta find your monitor's documentation, double-check what video card you have, look up how much memory, blah blah blah. Yet Knoppix does this AUTOMATICALLY???? (Or is that automagically?) Knoppix has been out for a while, their hardware detection should be implemented in every distribution!!
SuSE has had this for a while, what they call the Live CD. I believe they had them with the all the 7.x distros. And yes, it's available over at their site.
;oP
.sig there!
Yea, I know SuSE isnt availble free to d/l anymore, but I still like the distro quite a bit...
Can't get to the original article either, anyone have a mirror? I would like to read it
I do like the fact that Knoppix can deal with 2GB
of data due to on-the-fly-compression...and since it's running off a cd anyway, I'm sure it won't make a big performance difference...
caino
Don't touch my
and if anything catches the zietgest of our time, it's a purer form or UNIX developed by Americans, for Americans. Perhaps the FreeBSD team can put together their own boot CD with these utilities, and restrict the iso download to only American Ip addresses (which will no doubt annoy the crazy Dutchman De Raadt, be he's close enough to America to have a henchmen drive down from Vancouver to get it).
News for nerds. Stuff that OSNews has already mentioned.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
. . . Linux had been bootable for years!
$
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
I think the best point is that is Debian-based... and the hardware detection and configuration is awesome! Sure the debian guys can learn a bit... Free Software does not means impossible software, Knoppix!
I was introduced to Knoppix about a month and a half ago by a friend of mine in Texas (USA). Since then, I've burned several CD-R's and distributed them to other friends and acquaintances who are curious about Linux, but didn't want to "mess with" their Windows computers.
:-)
I think Knoppix is an excellent distro and a great way to introduce people to Linux. I'm thinking about infiltrating our local computer user's group (all Windows users) and seeing if I can hand-out some Knoppix CD's
No matter where you go... there you are.
I agree more distros should be doing this with one cavet. There should be the ability to stop and start the process so that you can decide when to let the automated process handle a piece of hardware, and when you should when it gets it wrong. Remember Windows install process sometimes "insisting" that a piece of hardware is this or that, and your fighting to change it's mind?
It already can serve as a Debian installation CD - and is arguably THE EASIEST Debian distro to install.
LinuxWorld has an article about this capability: here
The Knoppix-as-Debian-install-cd howto: here
What you describe sounds like Knoppix "Cheat Codes". These are simply parameters that can be entered at boot time to disable problematic detection of a particular component. So far, the only thing I've seen any problem detecting correctly has been CardBus on certain laptops.
i suppose, but then you run into the problem of needing to release a new DVD everytime month or so to catch all the version updates in that free software. Either that or fall so far behind the curve that you won't even be able to see it.
Still, Knoppix is great for at least one thing. It gives prospective Linux users an easy way to test the waters before they dive in by partitioning my hard drive.
lysergically yours
If by "winning" you mean making folks like you laugh, then on this site even when I win, I lose.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Obviously, Knoppix isn't really Linux if it does stuff for you automatically. As we all know, the only reason to use Linux is to have something to kill hours or days with while configuring arcane text files with no *understandable* documentation. By having this system just boot up and work, they've taken away the "Linuxness" of Linux itself. This is just a pale imitation of the Real Thing(tm).
creation science book
Correction:
Live from the Appolo theater, Krusty's Komedy Klasic.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
Mark Cappel
Editor
LinuxWorld
*sigh* I'll Bite, troll.. You can boot any distro up and write over the registry of a windows install existing on a FAT system, however NTFS only support read functionality and write is disabled in most kernels by default being that it WILL eat your data.
On the other hand NTFS permissions don't mean jack in a posix system. So you could boot up to a live boot, mount the win partition and read any data you werne't supposed to.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Hardware auto-detection is obviously a major step in bringing linux to the masses. I don't think it can be underestimated (although I understand when people like the more hands-on approach, I'm a gentoo lover, myself.) I've been hearing more and more about Knoppix recently. Gnumed, an open source medical practice management solution project that i'm following is using it as a demo cd. Since Knoppix is customizable, I was wondering how many people have tried creating their "own" OS-on-cd. Computers are everywhere, so it would seem practical to have your own customized operating system and personal desktop on cd. Forget dealing with how other people set up their computers and just throw in your own cd. hmmm, i'm getting excited now. how cool would it be to whip out one of those credit card shaped cd's from your wallet, and amaze your friends.
The Knoppix CD is great for demonstrating "the other way of life" to Windows users. I carry two discs with me at all times - one for demos to friends, neighbors and associates, one to give away.
m l
Has many programs and games for newbies.
Notes:
Need 80 megs of memory to run the KDE desktop or it will use a minimal windows manager (fvwm?)(not good if you are trying to win hearts and minds used to the Windows environment).
Has Open Office - runs slow off the CD - needs to be explained - otherwise a great demo disk.
It can be installed too !!!
Instructions at http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.ht
Knoppix is excellent as a demo distro, as an easy way to install Debian, but it's also a wonderful survival kit. When you're at a relative's (or friend's) house, you can take your Knoppix CD and a floppy (for the data). You can then hack&compile your projects, write documents (w/docbook or LaTeX). No need to ask them to install Emacs or anything else in their box. :-)
And the nice part is that it's customizable! You can change the packages that go in the CD using apt-get (but you'll need 3 Gb of disk space for that!) I think I'll compile and include the PCTEL driver... It's one thing I'll really need!
But do as the article says: modify it after booting from the KNOPPIX CD. It uses a special compressed-loop module (available from knoppix.net); the problem is that its stability seems to depend on which modules were compiled into the kernel, and the kernel from the CD is known to work fine. I've tried to compile the cloop module for my kernel, but things didn't work (cp -a stalls).
I have Knoppix running on an old Dell PII-233 as my MP3 player. I took out the hard drive, so it only runs on CD. I put in a 6-channal audio card hooked into the stereo and a video card w/TV-out (auto-detected, way cool). I run GNUMP3D on my Linux server, and now I can play all my MP3s through my stereo in the living room using the knoppix distro as the front end. (the wired keyboard/mouse isn't that elegant, I might get a wireless one eventually). The nice part is that it is pretty much silent when not in use.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I am taking a Computational Physics class, and the professor prefers to use Linux for its ease in compiling and running programs. Unfortunately the only computer lab available was filled with windows machines, so we just boot the Knoppix CDs everytime we start class. Its fast and very easy to set up.
----
Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
SYS 48192
creation science book
If you think doing it is so trivial, where is your live CD?
It's always easy to talk down on the work of others. But it's not very convincing unless you have own work to show.
I tried this on the weekend. Everything was going beautifully till I was informed my 1900mb partition didn't cut it. Yes, that's right, the HD install off the single KNOPPIX CD requires 2200MB free! Which is too bad -- KNOPPIX is the only distribution I've seen that autodetected all my hardware (particularly my Asound NIC) -- and that includes Mandrake 9 and RedHat 8 (RedHat didn't even properly setup the awe driver for my SB64).
I was blown away when I first saw KNOPPIX, and immediately went around throwing the CD into all my 98/XP-using friends' machines.
___________________ I want to be free()!
how cool would it be to whip out one of those credit card shaped cd's from your wallet, and amaze your friends.
What about an ordinary CD and one of those tiny storage devices that you plug to a USB port (where you keep all the data you'll work on)! (I could work on my phd thesis anywhere, without the need to be connected all the time Hmm... This is getting really interesting!
8-)
What a wonderful idea! I can see that this would make choosing a laptop much easier. No more guessing if the manufacturer added any weird proprietary stuff that Linux won't recognize. How many stores out there would let you do this though?
-- Craig Howard
Cool! I will have to inflict this on my brother's dying ME-based Gateway when it arrives from CheapBytes. My 56K modem can't handle downloading that iso.
Wonder if it will handle my other brother's dying Dell laptop with such aplomb? Worth a try I guess.
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Man i hate when the word hacker is used improperly to denote something bad.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In fact, Knoppix would have to be the closest thing to a "security distro" you can get your hands on;
First, you can use the elsewhere mentioned CHNTPW floppydisk to reset the sam database in NT and W2K on FAT32 and NTFS.
Secondly, a Knoppix CD is lethal in the hands of a skilled cracker, Knoppix sport a slew set of savvy tools bundled which could present it as "(cr|h)acker friendly":
john the ripper (passwordcracker w/NTLM patch)
Nessus Vulnerability Scanner
Ethereal packetsniffer
ettercap MITM tool(lets you sniff on switches too, via arp-cache poisoning)
nmap 3.0 portscanner
netcat (reverse connections, among others)
The CD also provides an excellent read-only medium for doing forensics on compromised systems.
I have been using Knoppix in securityeducation for about 3 months and have got nothing but positive reactions from even the most entrenched Microsoft techies. It comes with the latest and greatest KDE desktop which looks totally cool to the sh challenged, with GUI interfaces for most popular packages. Heck, the CD even comes bundled with 2 GB of executable software on a compressed filesystem. I got nothing but respect for Knopper and his distro, it's truly a piece of craftmanship.
Bodø community site
Me, and everyone I've shown it to, was simply blown away by Knoppix. And the deeper you look, the more impressed you are:
* On the surface, it's just a perfectly user-friendly demo disk. Power on, CD in, KDE up. Now you may or may not like KDE (I don't like it), but it gives an instant "slick" interface that can easily hold its own against the whole windos world.
* Then you realize it had a full-blown hardware autodetection, that works incredibly well - I've yet to see a machine where it doesn't come up fully automated and well-configured.
* It also includes everything you need to go online, no matter what your connection is. It does DHCP, PPP, ISDN (very common in Germany), PPPoE for the ADSL people, even wireless if you want.
* Then you start to wonder how all this stuff (900 packages, including all of OpenOffice, KOffice, more than a dozen small games, etc.) fits on the CD, and you learn that the guy wrote a compressed loop kernel module and everything is transparently decompressed when it's read from the CD!
* Finally, it's 100% GPL. All of it is Free Software tools bolted together intelligently.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I give out these cds like AOL cds :)
say what?
no isos, but ftp. that's the only install method I ever use. Set up, start, get lunch, come back, do the final set up, viola. Most other distros work similarly, I guess (or hope).
Your list of complaints are WAY to specific for me to believe that you yourself are not plagued by these exact conditions. I also believe at one point you offered me a job at Home Depot, which while nice, I'm going to have to take a pass.
You also used the word "buggery" which, as any American knows, is a word of the infamous brits, which I can't really hold against you. That curse was more of a "higher-power" type of fuck-over. I can always get a better job, but you'll always have just that one tooth.
Oh, and you seem quite obsessed with gay and animal fetishes. When you use them once, they're funny. When your reply looks like a 2 page essay advocating them, I'm going to have to call a spade a spade(a fag a fag).
Ya did good chester, but your insults were so specific it read like your autobiography, not like a troll. For that, I'm going to give you a C-. Remember, the gay shit only insults high school kids too nervous to take their drawers off in phys. ed. It's along the same lines as "your mom" jokes, which haven't bothered anyone past 7th or 8th grade. Keep the faith though man, their's got to be someone around here you can rip on.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
A couple of my friends are Windows Admins and I've managed to corrupt them enough to consider Knoppix as part of their tool kit, after all you can boot it, configure a network link and copy data off of the harddisk to a remote server if the normal OS will not boot.
One of them has also used it to demostrate linux using a sony laptop and a projector at our local computer club. This meant he could show Openoffice opening Word and Excel files, Gimp and Internet access thus showing that Linux does make a viable desktop replacement.
t
The fact that he complained that you couldn't eject a mounted CD with your root FS on it just kills me.
I use it on Dells a lot, however on systems that don't have boot roms. An Etherboot server would be nice ;)
Basically I use knoppix for getting random computers on the network. Formatting the hard drive and unpacking my prebuilt .tgz with everything already in it. Reboot, pop the cd and I've got a fully functional file server ready for production use in about 1 hour. Norton Ghost? We don't need no steenkin Norton Ghost!!
Will someone please make one of these that just boots to the seti client? Instant, non-destructive, painless borging!
Move along. No content to see here.
Checkout the home page. In short, its a small (~5MB) linux distribution designed to be booted from a CD, with autodetection of video and audio, and automatically plays all the media files placed in the root directory of the CD. It uses Mplayer to play the movies, so all formats supported by mplayer (pratically everything!!) are supported by movix. All u do is put your "movixed" cd in ur drive, reboot, and watch the movie...all the software for playing it is right there on the disk.
I have a laptop with a 250MHz processor, and Movix is the only way i can play Divx on it without dropping frames or loosing audio sync.
LinuxGhoul
Sigura Non Grata
It is unbelievable!
You just need one CD. plug it in the server, use a floppy with the MAC addresses of the clients and server ip. DONE! 15 PCs (with different hardware!!) here boot from a single CD in the server, no setup, no nothing, it just works. Nobody can fuck up the system, no hackers, no kiddies in the kiosk. It's amazing. Zero maintanence.
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
Shhhh. Das ist hoch Geheim.
Let me chime in with "Knoppix is great!" I used it just the other day to get info off a scrozzed WindowsME system before I wiped it.
/home, etc...
Something I'd like to see:
. Self-customizing: Run a script that saves all settings and then generates an custom Knoppix ISO.
. Using the custom ISO, you could boot, automatically mount samba/nfs shares, load up favorites, mount
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
(and I'm not mad about it)
...
:)
I have burned several Knoppix CDs for friends from my hard drive to my rather pokey internal CD-RW drive. However, since that's also a primary drive for me, I did not want to overtax it, and I now I will me making many more, so
I bought a CD burner on sale from Target (for those outside the Target area, har har, see www.target.com -- large American retail chain, for the last few years has been working on its image as a modern general store up the totem pole from Wal-Mart). Then, burner unopened, I decided to trade it in when I saw they had a *duplicator* for $250. It's only one-source-to-one-target (not a fancy thing with internal drive or 16 target trays), but can copy a full CD in about 5 minutes. (Perhaps they do in some areas, but I've never seen CompUSA or such stores to carry duplicators -- I find it a strange but nice decision on target's part to stock them.)
The drive is the 2nd generation (they were clearing out the 1st gen recently, I wish I had bought one of those instead), and though it has the currently popular "crystal black" look, I wish the top were not swoopy, so I could rest other things on it, which is perhaps the designers' point, but hey.
e3works.com -- if you want to see it. bad site, though.
Now: does anyone know how to make this drive work with Linux? I have tried two other external USB drives with Linux, and they have Just Worked with recent distros, Debian / Red hat / Mandrake. This one does not -- for instance, running cdrecord -scanbus does not find the drive. Yes, I have it switched to the "USB drive" mode rather than the Duplication mode. Anyone have tips?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
What's the command to use the CD as a bootdisk ??
I tried 'vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1' and 'knoppix root=/dev/hda1' at the boot: prompt as I would with a normal boot floppy, but without any luck.
I know it should be trivial, but I haven't guessed it yet.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I have burned ~8 copies of this for folks around here, used it to save some data off a friends new laptop (XP home) when it decided to eat itself.
... Made me wanna cry tears of joy... Well. maybe not tears, but major warm fuzzies in any case.
I literally don't leave home without it.
I also did an install off the CD, and then just did an "apt-get update"
Kudos to Mr, Knopper!!!
Sorry about that. You're both right. My brain said its and my hands went it's. --Mark
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk."
Okay. But the Knoppix install option which is really lacking is for use on the display machines at the local computer store:
If Knoppix were to add that feature, I guarantee you I'd be buying a lot of cheap blank CDs to get the local Best Buy, Future Shop, Radio Shack, Staples, etc.
"What do you mean, someone installed Linux on all the machines in our showroom? Where were you guys?"
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Indeed, note that the entire thing here is the
NTFS driver.
A dos based NTFS driver system (like ntfsdos or locksmith) will work too. Maybe there are ways for OS/2 even.
The basic insecurity is that the filesystem is not encrypted (the avg unix system btw isn't also, since it is quite expensive performancewise without proper encrypto hardware) AND that the user stores
data on his laptop (not a physically secured server)
An exploit utility is then only a matter of time.
In short, [Movix is] a small (~5MB) linux distribution designed to be booted from a CD
However, last time I checked (April 2002), XFree86 didn't fully support my laptop's video chip. It's a NeoMagic MagicGraph on an Acer TravelMate 721TX (standard laptop for Rose-Hulman class of 2003), and I've only got its TV output to work in Windows. If I were to use Movix, I would have to buy an expensive VGA to NTSC down-converter or watch video on an LCD panel the same size as a US Letter size sheet of paper, which is microscopic by home theater standards. Do you know of any cheaper workarounds?
Will I retire or break 10K?