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.

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sevg an hour ago | parent [-]

I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!

After that I always had a CD wallet thing with copies of sysresccd and supergrubdisk and others (including I think an old knoppix cd from a linux magazine).

	▲	dijit 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Similar story here. When I first started going towards Linux I tried, in this order: * Puppy linux, because I liked puppies. * College linux, because it was for education, and I was in secondary school, and college sounded fancy. * Adriane Knoppix, because it's what came up when you did a web search for "knoppix download" -- that was interesting, if you didn't know, ADRIANE is for blind people. * Whoppix (which became Whax) -- because I could actually find the download. * Backtrack linux (because that was apparently better than WHAX) * Slackware, because backtrack was based on this and "only script kiddies use Backtrack". I did the same as you, tried to keep things to liveCDs but I always got the urge to install them, so would do it periodically until everything broke. This also meant I had to deal with whatever was broken (usually wifi). One thing I remember very fondly though, which isn't a linux, is the leaked Geek Squad rescue CD... I'd give a decent chunk of change for an updated one of those..