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.
compiz was amazing, I remember playing with the wobbly windows for hours
Knoppix
51–60 of 129 posts
Re: Knoppix
#52Fun 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.
I frequently see things on HN where people just share the website of a well known project. I assume it's for people who legit never heard of it. Maybe they're younger. I think of a saying, every year a new generation discovers the Beatles for the first time.
Re: Knoppix
#53I started using Linux with Redhat but when they stopped doing the free version (sometime in the late 90's) I wanted to switch to Debian so I used Knoppix as a stepping stone to get there. Really made it easy. Then, somewhere around 2006 or 2007, I met Klaus Knopper and his wife at one of the Ubuntu developer summits. I think it was the one in Paris. Really nice guy and with the help of his wife, they did a lot of work to help people with vision impairment use Linux.
Re: Knoppix
#54Fun 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.
I frequently see things on HN where people just share the website of a well known project. I assume it's for people who legit never heard of it. Maybe they're younger. I think of a saying, every year a new generation discovers the Beatles for the first time.
Re: Knoppix
#55When I was a kid I got obsessed with Linux, but my family only had one PC in the living room. After an attempt to set up Windows/Linux dual boot where I messed up the partition table, my parents banned me from tinkering with it. Luckily I discovered Knoppix and other live distros, which allowed me to boot into a safe environment to play around in.
I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!
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).
Re: Knoppix
#56Kanotix was even better. Kano built on top of knoppix.
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).
Re: Knoppix
#57The go-to live cd that helped me fix many Windows XP installs! Thanks for the memory.
I first thought there was something new about it
Re: Knoppix
#58Back in 2001 or so, I was studying in a college in another city, and traveled back home during breaks and on some weekends. On one occasion, I took a Knoppix mini-CD with me, repartitioned the hard drive on my mom's computer to cut a small ext2 partition for myself, installed Knoppix (there was a script to install it on HDD), set grub timeout to something like 1 second so no one would ever notice, and enjoyed my very own hidden Linux every time I visited home.
I'm pretty sure that if I manage to find that HDD, it will boot today.
Re: Knoppix
#59Fond memories of Knoppix from when I was younger. Many many thanks to the authors.
Re: Knoppix
#60There was a time that this was the easiest way to install Debian.
100%. The detection/configuration of hardware just worked out of the box. It's a must-have for a livecd and still a reeeealy nice-to-have for your permanent install back then.