Booting Knoppix: A Short Photo Tour

In my post on Tasting Linux, I mentioned Live CDs as a way of sticking your toe in the Linux pool to see whether it might be fun to dive in.

I thought it would be fun to show some pictures of what a Knoppix Live CD boot looks like. This is just an intro, not a detailed HOWTO.

The computer I used is an Acer laptop with a Intel Centrino Dual Core 1.99 GHz chip running Windows XP Pro:

Loading the Knoppix CD, which I burned from an *.ISO downloaded from the Knoppix website. There is also a version called “Gnoppix” that uses the Gnome Desktop called “Gnoppix”:

When the CD first loads, it gives you a chance to back out:

Knoppix uses the K Desktop Environment (KDE), one of the many graphical front-ends available in the Linux and Unix world:

Here, I use Konqueror to surf the web:

Here, I use the Konqueror to look at a document which, when the computer boots into Windows, is located in my “My Documents” folder on the C: Drive.

This also illustrates how a Live CD can be used for data recovery or repair if a computer won’t boot, but the harddrive is still physically okay. I could copy a healthy version of a corrupted file into place or copy my data off to a thumbdrive without going to the trouble of removing the harddrive, jumpering it to be a slave, and putting it into another computer. I could not use it to repair a corrupted Windows registry:

And I bring the tour to an end by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting “Log Out,” which will take me to a “End Session/Restart/Turn Off” screen: