13.1. Introduction

Facing a nonbooting system is one of life's less pleasant sensations. Knoppix, a complete Debian-based Linux distribution on a live, bootable CD, is a first-rate recovery disk. You get over 2 GB of Linux utilities and drivers, compressed onto a 700-MB CD. It has great hardware detection, supports all the major filesystems, automatically finds your existing partitions, creates mountpoints, and automatically finds your DHCP server. If you need to configure networking manually, it has a nice utility called netcardconfig. Knoppix can't be beat for ease of use. Just pop it in, boot it up, and everything works.

Knoppix can be downloaded as a 700-MB .iso, or you can purchase commercially produced CDs, which is nice for folks with slow or expensive Internet service.

A entire creative community has grown up around Knoppix; on Knoppix.net you'll find a large number of specialty projects inspired by Knoppix, and howtos for creating your own custom bootable live CD.