| Fast-booting Knoppix LiveCD does it in 60 secs |
Mar. 01, 2006
Japan's Alpha Systems Wednesday released Accelerated Knoppix 1.0 -- an offshoot of the standard Knoppix live CD -- which the company claims is one of the fastest-booting Linux distributions available. Alpha rearranged the Cloop file system block and optimized the hardware detection/configuration step, which reduces bootup to under 60 seconds, yet maintains the full functionality of the distribution, the company said.
Previous versions of Knoppix generally are much slower to boot up due to hardware detection and on-the-fly decompression of the operating system, Alpha said. This faster-booting variant optimizes those parts of the file system, it added.
Accelerated Knoppix 1.0 comes with the 2.6.12.4 kernel and a collection of GNU/Linux software and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices, and other peripherals. Standard features include Gnome Office, KOffice, OpenOffice 2.0, GMIP 2.2.8, and KDE desktop.
Knoppix can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.
More details -- including some illustrations of the technology -- can be found here. The group is also planning to release a separate acceleration kit under the GNU Public License (GPL) that will allow other Knoppix developers to make their existing operating systems boot faster, the company said.
Accelerated Knoppix version 1.0 (692 MB) can be downloaded here.
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