Freestyle LiveCD Linux Distro Shootout

First distro to help me get some files off of this non-booting, non-disk-mounting system is the winner.

The place: My lab.

The setup: One faulty linux box (installed with Fedora Core 2), one or more failed drives and NO INTERNET!

On-hand for the competition were, Gentoo 2004.2, Knoppix and Gnoppix (Ubuntu). The Fedora Core 3 DVD ISO was also on-hand.

This was unfortunately, not a drill. During my internet outage of last week, I decided to try and upgrade my linux box (ayane) to the more recent Fedora Core 3. Better hardware support were my main motivations for doing this, but mostly, it was just boredom and looking for something to kill time. I had no complaints with FC2 and it was getting the job done for me. My machine had an uptime of somewhere around 30 days when I decided to do this.

The first indication that something was going horribly wrong was Anaconda, the Fedora installer kit threw-up an exception during the install process. Not good. It was also right after Anaconda asked me if I would like to “automagically” convert my EXT2 disks to the newer, journalled EXT3 filesystem. Very not good.

An attempt to reboot ayane only proved more disturbing. She would not boot cleanly. One of the drives was failing an fsck. At this point, I could have done a few things. I could have changed my fstab/mtab to not automount all my drives and try rebooting. I think the drive containing the root filesystem was mostly alright as it did manage to load the kernel at least. Nevertheless, I was most concerned about getting my NeverWinterNights saved games off the disk so I proceeded to go all CSI on the machine and get down with a LiveCD distro.

And that’s where this completely unscientific shootout comes in. I had downloaded and burned these distros with the intention of using them as diagnostic tools if I ever needed one. Fedora Core is bulky if you don’t have a DVD drive and the ability to boot of an optical disk into a running OS is pretty useful compared to the klunky but powerful command-line diagnostics of FC. Especially if you’re a permanoob like myself and don’t know “stuff” about “things”.

So, down to work. First up is Gentoo. Voted the most-rapidly-adopted distro of 2004, Gentoo is not your typical LiveCD distribution. On load, Gentoo drops you into a colourful command-line interface and a bash prompt. After blinking along with the flashing cursor for a second, trying a few tentative mount commands and the command-line plea: “Please get my files back, gentoo,” I rebooted.

Yes, I’ve heard good things about Gentoo, but without an internet connection to point me to where the docs live, that just wasn’t going to cut it.

Next is Gnoppix. I like Gnome stuff. Their desktop looks nice and the version wrapped up by RedHat is, in my opinion, one of the nice features of Fedora Core. The Ubuntu version has a nice boot screen and a cute desktop. At this point, I was having a hard time mounting drives and getting a root terminal. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere, but for some reason, it didn’t seem obvious to me. Also, Gnoppix did not recognize my gigabit ethernet card and the network did not want to come up. This was a bummer and I decided to give my third disc a try before changing hardware configurations.

Knoppix, also booted cleanly but had a lot more interesting stuff on the terminal while it did. It looked to me like this was built by PC hackers and I appreciated that as this was what I was attempting to do. The Knoppix desktop was clean and sported all of the usual KDE apps. Getting a root terminal open and very importantly, mounting my disks was easy to do. Still no network though, but I was encouraged enough by my successes to swap ethernet cards and try Knoppix again.

About an hour and a half later, I had a successful tarball of my user directory copied over to my Mac.

So, maybe it’s due to ignorance. Maybe it’s due to bad first impressions, but I’m declaring Knoppix the klear winner in this shootout. It’s the one I’ll be carrying in my bag with me.