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.

Back 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.

In Grade 10 we'd pass around a Knoppix CD in the computer lab to boot up into something a bit more useful than the "Student Vista" locked down Windows XP machines.

I remember there being a sliding puzzle game in the theme of assembling molecules. I remember this because I remember a very classic argument between two teenagers over "propene" being a typo of "propane" vs. being an actual chemical. If only they were sitting in front of a device that could help them find the answer.

Knoppix 1.0 is still my first experience of linux that worked right out of the box. Forever gave me a fondness for live CD/DVD booting.

Fun 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.

Fond memories of Knoppix from when I was younger. Many many thanks to the authors.

I 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.

I remember a cool implementation detail about the earliest Knoppix version (don't remember which one) I had that was documented somewhere on that disc - when constructing a release filesystem image, the boot process was instrumented to get an ordered list of files being read. Then that list was fed into an image building program so when written to a CD, the files will be organized in an optimal order so a linear read with some readahead would get you a better boot time.

I had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB hdd. or maybe it was later on my Pentium II with 128Meg and 6.4GB Fireball!

Either way I used it a good few times to rescue data and generally fiddle with all sort of pcs from this era. (late 90's to early 2000')

The 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

I built a 40 (later 80) node cluster with clusterknoppix ~2006 to run a bunch of physics simulations off of old library computers after I replaced a bunch of PSU fans. Kept my cubicle toasty until we moved them into a random subterranean room I think was used for some early nuclear research at university.

I fixed a lot of Windows machines, especially partition issues, with Knoppix up until around 2014. I used to also use the wireless tools to detect rogue access points in hotels where my employer was providing internet access. Those were some good times, and helped me learn quite a bit about networking and security in general.

Knoppix was useful when a linux box got hosed and would not boot for some reason. Boot into Knoppix, you have an easy root shell and almost all the tools you'd need to fix a broken system.

Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.

This is a blast from the past. Knoppix saved my life a few times, it was the easiest way to mount a drive with a broken partition table or something else went that haywire with a dual-boot system. It was also the safest option for doing something on a public computer without leaving a trace (though back then NIC drivers were always a bit finicky).

My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.

There was a time that this was the easiest way to install Debian.

I was maybe 9 years old when I first used Linux, and it was with Knoppix and KDE. Loved early plasma. Arch is my thing these days, but KDE is still my DE of choice. Glad to see KHTML from Konquerer living in Blink and WebKit these days, too!

I used to use knoppix to rescue broken systems back in the day, including many a Windows machine. Always did what I needed it to. Glad to see it’s still around.

This was the first Linux I used (mainly, to play Nibbles for Knoppix). The live-boot CD was a treasured belonging. Good times!

Wait, I thought the official web page for Knoppix was <https://knoppix.net/>? What is this knopper.net?

Knoppix got really popular in Germany in the 2000s when it was still common that PC magazines were sold with CD-ROMs. Especially c't, Germany's most prestigious computer magazine, made Knoppix popular with their bootable Linux CDs for data rescue issues.

Knoppix was the first Linux distro I ever tried back in the early 2000s. IIRC it was only a few hundred megs.

At the time it didn't have the overlayfs feature which often felt limiting since most directories were read only. Slax felt like a serious upgrade since you could install more packages after booting the CD.

I think Knoppix was the original live CD distro though?

Knoppix: The OG. No AI was used.

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.

What a blast from the past. Seeing Knoppix on my room mate's PC in 2004 is what led to a 20+ year ongoing adventure with Linux, Debian, gaming on Linux, compiling games with a friggin compiler and automake, programming, it all started with that distro.

Kanotix 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).

Klaus Knopper, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Isn't this what eventually became Kali linux? I remember Knoppix and Whoppix then I didn't really check on the projects for a while then Kali came along

That's a blast from the past. I remember repairing my main install from a minimal Knoppix on my 1GB USB drive... Good old times.

Brings back memories. One of my earlier Linux touch points. There was also this sibling Kanotix. Good times.