Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition

Preface

As with so many great open source projects, Knoppix started because Klaus Knopper had an itch to scratch. Klaus wanted to take many of his favorite open source tools with him so he could work wherever he went and on any computer he had access to. Because he didn’t want the expense of a laptop or the worry of losing or damaging it, he created a bootable Linux CD distribution called Knoppix. With Knoppix, Klaus was able to go from computer to computer and get right to work with an operating system and environment he was familiar with, and without the need to install software on every computer he came into contact with. Many people only view Knoppix as a Linux demo disk, a job it does perform quite well, but even from the beginning, Knoppix was to be used to get real work done.

Klaus wanted to be able to work on any computer, regardless of the hardware in the system, so he continued to improve the hardware support for Knoppix until it was able to recognize and automatically configure much of the hardware it came in contact with. There are a lot of live Linux CDs, but Knoppix’s excellent hardware support, combined with the general flexibility of the included software, has made Knoppix the most popular.

Over the years, I have used many different live CDs both as demonstration disks and for system recovery. I have never been a Boy Scout, but I have always liked the idea of being prepared for anything, and at any moment, I might have been carrying a DemoLinux CD or a LinuxCare Bootable ...