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Comment by bdz | Hacker News Reader

I was in high school and that was the first time I've ever seen a live CD. A full functioning OS running on a CD? School PCs were running XP and most things were locked down. But lo and behold the magic live CD made you do a lot of things otherwise were not allowed. Good times. I always had a live CD with me for years (and it was actually really useful)

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I recall getting a shipment of about 50 CDs simply by asking for some online. I handed them out to just about anyone, mostly peers at school, however I remember having some left over and tossing some out during Halloween amongst some candy to some young kids too. I like to think at least a few of them got used and hopefully introduced a couple to a lifelong addiction to Linux.

Those dark, dark hours/days/weeks with Xorg really made me into the hacker I am today. If the forums weren't there, read the docs, if the docs weren't helpful you could read the source. Not being stonewalled while discovering how to work with one's computer is a wonderful experience.

Happy Birthday to such a wonderful OS!

> Those dark, dark hours/days/weeks with Xorg really made me into the hacker I am today. If the forums weren't there, read the docs, if the docs weren't helpful you could read the source. Not being stonewalled while discovering how to work with one's computer is a wonderful experience.

Same thing here. I distinctly recall having a stack of different linux distros that I would install and switch between, then spend hours configuring the os, tweaking xorg, etc.

> If the forums weren't there, read the docs, if the docs weren't helpful you could read the source.

This experience made me a true believer. Never needed to do it with kernel source code, but with libraries and userspace apps.

Hitting the closed-source wall in SDKs and environments like Matlab is frustrating and takes all the fun out of programming.

Coming from someone who grew up during the floppy diskette booting and installing era of computing... what Knoppix managed to do by giving us the LiveCD just still seems like pure black magic fuckery to me. Install an OS from CD? Fine. USING an OS only booting from CD? HOLY SHIT.

I'm glad it became an option on the majority of distributions. IMHO it still remains the killer feature over Windows if you want to show someone what Linux can do.

I recall a dormmate of mine, probably circa 2008, had a broken Windows installation and just ran off a live Ubuntu CD for a while. He didn't see the point in installing, I guess.

There were Linux distributions which were intended to run from Live CDs. I remember one that offered the core Gnome desktop with OpenOffice. It was created for people who needed a distraction free working environment.

If I remember correctly, QNX 4 demo was the first graphical OS that I've seen booting and running from a floppy. That was somewhere in late 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128112050/http://www.qnx.co...

As impressive as it was at the time (and still is), a floppy is writable.

Booting from read only media and having a fully functioning OS was completely groundbreaking. Especially when you consider how much hardware was supported without configuration.

As I recall, it worked exactly like a modern live CD, with no state saved to the disk.

Hmm, a bit hazy on the details and of course entirely possible that I misunderstood something fundamental at the time, but...

I donated a "Frankenstein" PC to our high school classroom (or added random parts that were missing to an existing one -- can't remember) and had a regular CD drive and a SCSI harddisk attached to a SCSI controller. The motherboard's BIOS didn't know how to boot from the SCSI harddisk so I put a bootloader and kernel on a CD and used that to boot from the harddisk.

Worked like a charm. Ran enlightenment for the looks and played a lot of clanbomber with a classmate!

Edit: Aw, looks like clanbomber isn't in the Debian repositories anymore. Shame :(

Edit2: I think I slept on the couch at the local hackerspace (with fast internets) after getting that system to run (and brought the computer to school on the next day). Nostalgia~

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