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Knopperdisk is a small, Gentoo based, Linux distribution. It comes in two flavors: floppy and USB pen-drive. The USB version, which will be reviewed here, contains many useful utilities which would make it a handy rescue Linux distro.

To start, I took a 128MB memory stick, deleted everything off it, and downloaded Knopperdisk. Following the directions on the website, I copied the distribution files to the memory stick (in Foresight Linux that was still installed to my desktop from my last review), and ran syslinux on it.

I rebooted my desktop and, using the BIOS based boot menu (F8 on my A8N-SLI motherboard), selected the USB memory stick as the boot device.

The syslinux boot prompt came up, I hit enter, and the kernel messages started scrolling on the screen. Being based on Gentoo, the familiar init messages started scrolling. I noticed that Knopperdisk uses framebuffer which gave me a higher resolution console. Knopperdisk is a console only (at this point) distribution. Based on the website, the creator of this distro may one day add X to it. Incidentally this is also the reason this review lacks any screenshots.

Anyway, the login prompt appeared with instructions on what the password was to login to the root account. I logged in and the command prompt came up. There was no hardware auto-detection so I had to load the module for my network card manually. Since my system has an nForce 4 chipset, I had to execute modprobe forcedeth to use my NIC. Once I did that, I did an ifconfig eth0 and my NIC appeared and was configured with an IP address, courtesy of dhcpcd being started at boot.

The distribution contains elinks, the text-based web browser. I checked a few websites with it, remembering when I used to use text-based browsers as the norm. Elinks worked pretty good as a text HTML browser.

Beyond that, the distribution includes a number of useful utilities including SSH, ClamAV, shorewall firewall, and nmap. A full list of packages is on the Knopperdisk website. Knopperdisk includes packages to support wireless networking, but I didn’t try them as I was using my desktop without a wireless NIC.

I used SSH to connect to some servers at work, and I also ran nmap against my MacBook Pro to make sure my firewall was working properly. Further, because it includes ClamAV, you could use it as an anti-virus scanner. Just boot up a PC with Windows on it using Knopperdisk and run ClamAV on it to check for viruses. Of course you’d have to make sure it had the latest virus definitions, but it is still a useful feature.

Because the shorewall firewall is included, one could quickly have a simple firewall up and running using Knopperdisk.

Knopperdisk, being small, doesn’t have a huge range of functionality. But, the features it does have are useful, particularly to systems administrators who could use it for a number of tasks including repairing file systems on servers and as a network testing tool.

While Knopperdisk isn’t the only small USB bootable Linux distribution out there, it does what it was intended to do. I found nothing in my testing that didn’t work on Knopperdisk. I successfully got shorewall up and running after all the necessary configuration. The only thing I would’ve liked would be hardware auto-detection, but most people who would probably try Knopperdisk can probably figure out what modules they need to get their NIC working. Also, all the man pages for the included programs that I tested were installed.

I would say that Knopperdisk would definitely be useful to those who need a small USB bootable Linux distribution. Clearly it won’t be for everyone. Without having tried other distributions bootable from USB memory sticks I can’t say how it stacks up against them, but Knopperdisk certainly worked for me.

If you’ve used Knopperdisk or similar Linux distributions let me know how it compares.