Roman Shaposhnik's

I still remember the coolness factor that the first fully functional and user friendly LiveCD with Linux had. From a technical stand point it wasn't really that much of a novel concept (all major Linux distributors had a capability of booting into a function Linux kernel for the installation and troubleshooting purposes) but as everything with Linux -- it had some significant social implications. What Klaus Knopper singlehandlely changed was not what Linux was capable of, but rather how it presented itself for the first time. All of a sudden just about anybody could take it for a spin. It got friendlier, it got less intrusive and even if you didn't like it -- hey, at least it hadn't made you slave away for a day installing it (and trashing your Windows partition along the way). Fast forward to 2008 and you can see that one of the most prevalent Linux distributions, Ubuntu, still uses ideas from Knoppix to advance Linux adoption. Life is good, if only... boring. Yep, that's right -- there's nothing exciting about a Linux LiveCD from major vendors anymore. It is polished, mature and leaves nothing to blog about. Not to worry though, with the Project Indiana debuting its live CD of OpenSolaris a couple of weeks ago we now have a brand new frog to dissect and marvel at.[Read More]