Knoppix Hacks

Reviewed by Major Keary

The popularity of the Knoppix bootable CD is at least in part due to its usefulness as a rescue utility. Knoppix is a Linux distro out of Germany and the live CD frequently appears on the covers of computer magazines.

Apart from enabling novices to test drive Linux without altering anything on their respective machines, it is a good tool for establishing if a system is compatible with Linux and if it will recognise peripherals (printers, scanners, and the like). It is also useful for when the resident operating system fails: Knoppix can be used as a repair-and-rescue utility.

Knoppix has been given a further boost by the release of Knoppix Hacks, a title in O'Reilly's innovative hacks series. In a foreword Klaus Knopper, creator of Knoppix, says his distro—which is based on Debian—was originally designed as a rescue disk, but has been developed as a Linux distribution in its own right.

A significant problem is the lack of documentation. There are lots of man pages and other on-line documentation, but the user has to know what to look for and where to find it. Online documentation is often terse and not nearly as easy to use as a proper book.

Knoppix now has a book, Knoppix Hacks. It is not a manual or reference in the ordinary sense. Each title in the hacks series represents the work of many people who have developed or documented solutions to particular problems, and that is how Knoppix Hacks works. It contains a comprehensive collection of "100 industrial-strength tips and tools" that begin with booting Knoppix on a desktop, where to find it, running it on a laptop, running it from a hard disk, and using the command line. From there the hacks cover an amazingly diverse range of solutions that can be applied to non-Knoppix distros.

If you want to learn Linux—or need to point a novice in the right direction—the Knoppix distro and this book make a powerful combination; the book, of course, comes with a Knoppix CD. Each 'hack' is a mixture of tutorial and discussion of underlying issues; by following the instructions (but taking care with the destructive commands, such as wiping a hard drive) the user should achieve a good grasp of Linux and how to use it.

The book is well written and does not require any special; technical knowledge. It is a matter of being sufficiently interested in learning Linux, or exploring the potential of the Knoppix CD as a rescue tool for Windows or other installations of Linux. The text is supported by plenty of example code that is also available for download from a companion web site.

A great opportunity for novices to experience a stable operating system and its extraordinary choice of applications.

Kyle Rankin: Knoppix Hacks
ISBN 0-596-00787-6
Published by O'Reilly, 314 pp. + CD, RRP $55.00 incl. GST