Linux Cookbook

Chapter 13. System Rescue and Recovery with Knoppix

Introduction

Facing a nonbooting system is one of life’s less pleasant sensations. Knoppix, a complete Debian-based Linux distribution on a live, bootable CD, is a first-rate recovery disk. You get over 2 GB of Linux utilities and drivers, compressed onto a 700-MB CD. It has great hardware detection, supports all the major filesystems, automatically finds your existing partitions, creates mountpoints, and automatically finds your DHCP server. If you need to configure networking manually, it has a nice utility called netcardconfig. Knoppix can’t be beat for ease of use. Just pop it in, boot it up, and everything works.

Knoppix can be downloaded as a 700-MB .iso, or you can purchase commercially produced CDs, which is nice for folks with slow or expensive Internet service.

An entire creative community has grown up around Knoppix; on Knoppix.net you’ll find a large number of specialty projects inspired by Knoppix, and howtos for creating your own custom bootable live CD.

13.2. Booting Knoppix

Problem

You want to customize Knoppix’s boot process. First, you need to find out what boot-time options Knoppix has.

Solution

To see all boot options, hit F2 at the prompt.

You can just pop Knoppix into the drive and let it boot itself, but there are a large number of boot-time options at your disposal. The default keyboard layout is German, so you might want to change it to your own locale:

               knoppix lang=uk

The default desktop is KDE. You can choose a ...