OS on a CD
September 7th, 2004
My laptop hard drive recently crashed. Not a fun experience. Anyway, after struggling to make sure I had correctly backed up my files I wondered how I was going to be productive on a computer without a hard drive.
I stumbled upon Knoppix, a Linux bootable CD. I had tried Knoppix several years ago when I was first trying to learn Linux, and was unimpressed. However, I was facing several days without a hard drive, and I still needed to use my laptop, so I decided to give Knoppix a try again to see what it would do.
I got a copy of the CD (it’s a free download), plugged it in, and turned on my laptop. I was interested to see what it would do without a hard drive. To my surprise, it booted right up and started recognizing my hardware. Even though I didn’t have a hard drive, Knoppix didn’t skip a beat. I was soon looking at a nice and clean interface.
Knoppix is full of programs you wouldn’t think would fit on a single CD. It has a great web browser (Mozilla Firefox), a full office suite (OpenOffice) that is compatible with Microsoft Office, and even a high-end graphics editor (GIMP). I was able to use all of these programs (plus literally hundreds of others) with no problems. Knoppix even created a virtual hard drive that I could use to save documents and files. As long as I didn’t turn off my laptop, I could reopen files, edit them and save as though I actually had a hard drive. Pretty slick.
Overall, I was surprised at how far Knoppix had come. I would definitely recommend Knoppix to anyone who wants to mess around with Linux and see what it has to offer as far as programs go. Oh, and by the way, it also works great if you have no hard drive and are waiting to get one back from the manufacturer.