Knoppix boots Linux

Knoppix is a bootable CD. Although it's certainly not unique in that, the organization and content of a Knoppix CD are distinctive. Consider a few scenarios. Suppose you're an instructor. You meet your students in a training room, with only half an hour to check out all the hardware and prepare configurations for them. The result is inevitable: halfway through class, some of your demonstrations won't work, because at least a few of the student machines will have inconsistent Service Pack installations, or hardware that's never been exercised, or an environment customized by a subtle neurotic.

Or perhaps you have piles of commodity hardware. No one particularly cares about all that computing capacity -- except on the few days of the year around the Super Bowl, or Tax Day, or perhaps when your organization runs its quarterly massive simulations of the weather patterns over the North Pacific. How do you bring all those heterogeneous hosts into effective teamwork, without investing too much of your own time in tedious configuration "burn-in"?

Maybe you're just a mobile person; you move around and would happily use whatever desktops are available, but in practice you find they rarely have the software you consider necessary for a minimal working environment. You might want a quick way to set up a security scanner, a well-equipped office automation desktop on a firewalled interior network, or a secure server. Or perhaps you're often called to check out consumer-grade machines with mysterious symptoms. If you could simply exercise a consistent set of diagnostics, you wouldn't have to rely so much on end-user speculation such as, "the modem has a virus, doesn't it?".

These are just a few of the occasions when Knoppix solves simply what otherwise can be thorny problems. Knoppix's inventor, Klaus Knopper, is himself a trainer who launched the Knoppix project "in between 1999-2000," in his recollection, as an educational project and to meet his own requirements.

As 2003 begins, the main Knoppix product is an open source CD-ROM that boots into GNU/Linux, is remarkably effective and swift at detecting hardware and installing correct drivers, and cleverly uses on-the-fly decompression to make room for almost 2 GB of applications and data. Moreover, as Knopper tells it, one of Knoppix's main features is "the GPL license for the software collection as well as all scripts and tools written by me, which allows the recipients to modify, distribute, and sell the CD on their own."

Still, this simple description hides plenty. While Linux adepts often experiment with bootable media, and many applications rely on data compression, Knoppix shows a singular level of polish. It's simple, only because Knopper and a few other project contributors took so much care in constructing it to be simple.