Knoppix • Hacker News Board

Re: Knoppix

#111

Post by garkotipankaj » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

fasterik wrote: post #46

When 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.

Same story! I discovered Porteus (based on slackware) and used it from a 8gb sandisk usb for years. It shipped with xfce and was a blast to tinker with. I learned to compile software from source for it because the package management was non-existent. Taught me a lot. AAAND it's still live: https://www.porteus.org

Re: Knoppix

#112

Post by hackerbrother » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

Loved Damn Small Linux, a Knoppix variant.

Re: Knoppix

#113

Post by akoboldfrying » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

garkotipankaj wrote: post #111

fasterik wrote: post #46

When 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.

Same story! I discovered Porteus (based on slackware) and used it from a 8gb sandisk usb for years. It shipped with xfce and was a blast to tinker with. I learned to compile software from source for it because the package management was non-existent. Taught me a lot. AAAND it's still live: https://www.porteus.org

I used a Porteus boot USB a couple of years ago to rescue the secondary hard drive on my Dad's ancient Windows 7 PC. The drive had partially died, making it inaccessible under Windows -- but 99% of the disk was still readable with Linux's NTFS support. There was some glitch that caused the GUI to lock up shortly after booting about 80% of the time, but if I could make it to the console tty it worked like a charm!

Re: Knoppix

#114

Post by AstroJetson » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:00 AM UTC

My first efforts in cluster computing was Cluster Knoppix. I would go into the training lab with 25 PCs and boot them all into a single cluster. When I was done for the night it was an easy reboot back.

Fun times

Re: Knoppix

#115

Post by deathanatos » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

fasterik wrote: post #46

When 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 also wanted to experiment with Linux at a young age, and so I tried booting it with LOADLIN[1]. I didn't know what I was doing, but I did successfully boot the kernel with a minimal rootfs! So minimal, it didn't have an init — which of course causes a quick kernel panic. Didn't yet have the know how to figure out what I was doing wrong. My mom asked "did you mess up the computer?" Nope, since with LOADLIN you didn't need to format.

Had to give up on that approach, but discovered Knoppix shortly afterwards, and that taught me Linux.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin

Re: Knoppix

#116

Post by totetsu » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #82

I used knoppix (and later SLAX) in high school to reboot shared computers (library, labs, etc) and then extract the SAM file from the C:\ drive. I would shuttle the file home on a USB stick and crack it overnight. After doing this on a handful of computers I ended up having virtually every teacher/admin password in the school, including the domain admin which was no shit all lowercase "north". The crack was so fast f…

Did you have to pretend a terminal was broken and call the domain admin or teacher over to log into it to get their credentials cached locally in that file in the first place?

Re: Knoppix

#117

Post by fjert » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 4:38 AM UTC

fasterik wrote: post #46

When 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 had a similar experience that led me to Knoppix when I was a kid. I was tinkering around with a hex editor and messed up the Windows MBR with it so I found and burned Knoppix to a disc at a library. I remember my mom complaining about things being... different

Re: Knoppix

#118

Post by globular-toast » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:51 AM UTC

I loved live CDs. It was so magical at the time. I remember booting Backtrack (now called Kali Linux) in my university library and feeling like such a badass. Ubuntu started to come with a live CD and I remember when they merged the live CD and installer which meant you could use your computer to browse the web etc while it was installing. Good times.

Re: Knoppix

#119

Post by tetris11 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

srijan4 wrote: post #72

Oh man, fond memories. I remember being very interested in programming in middle/high school, but all the environments in our school computer lab had windows (this was in India), and I think at that time (maybe 2001-2003) I didn't even know there were other operating systems. Our school was participating in something called International Cyber Olympiad, and of course I gave the eligibility exam. They sent all student…

Similar experience at my early uni days in UK - no PC at home and lugging around a heavy laptop wasnt so easy, so I had Slackware on a USB stick and would routinely go to the computer clusters to boot it up over the Windows mess they had.

The physics dept. was full of GNU evangelists, so thankfully they had real Linux machines. Everywhere else though, Microsoft had sunk its claws into

Re: Knoppix

#120

Post by hbogert » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

Such a well-done gateway to any aspiring linux users. I think it was 2000 when i first loaded a knoppix image. I couldn't believe the 'live' concept could work and you could just start full functioning browsers! It was truly magical.