Seriously? These are your idea of the top twenty?

Story: Gallery: The 20 most significant events in Linux's 20-year history Total Replies: 4
Author Content
dinotrac

Sep 12, 2011
6:19 PM EDT 		Certainly a lot of good stuff in there, but...

What about the creation of Samba? Samba was Linux's first foot in the door of many corporate environments in the late 90's, during a wave of "make the network bigger, faster and more reliable" coincided with a wave of "don't spend so much money".

Or what about 1999 or so, when Oracle, Informix, and DB2 became available in Linux versions? For that matter, SAP?

Some serious pushes from that stuff.

And...How do you do a top twenty list that includes distribution after distribution after distribution without at least a node to Apache, the other big corporate wedge for Linux?
vainrveenr

Sep 12, 2011
7:34 PM EDT 		Would also consider the great efforts of Klaus Knopper in creating the first highly popular LiveCD, Knoppix, to also be among the top "most significant events".

From DistroWatch's 'Knoppix - Instant Gratification' found at http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=review-knoppix :
Quoting:Live From Germany

Knoppix is a "live CD" distro - just boot it and use it. You do need a CD drive of course, but you don't need a hard disk. The implications of this are significant. It means you have a portable Linux that you can take with you wherever you go. This can be used in a number of innovative ways - as a demo disk, as a rescue disk, as a way to use Linux at your local Windows-only Internet cafe. Some people even take a Knoppix disk with them when they go shopping for a new computer, a clever way to ensure that the hardware will be Linux compatible before you purchase it.

To be fair, Knoppix was not the first live CD ever created. Apple, for example, distributed MacOS (even before OSX) on a live CD. Linux has had DemoLinux, SUSE Live-Eval and Cool Linux, as well as some others. But none of these have come close to the functionality of Knoppix, which could justifiably claim the title as "first useful live CD." Even though Knoppix has inspired a number of clones (Gnoppix, Morphix, Freeduc, Quantian, to name a few), it still remains the most popular live CD distro by far.

Most people are just awe-struck the first time they see a Knoppix CD boot. Probably the thing that blows them away is the hardware auto-detection. There is really nothing to configure - just boot the CD, and two to three minutes later you have a beautiful desktop system. This is remarkable, given the lack of standards (and lack of driver documentation) that exists in the PC world.

Knoppix took the Linux world by storm in late 2002, but actually it's history is a little bit longer than that. Klaus Knopper of Germany started his experiment with "Knopper's *nix" about three years ago. As he tells the story, it wasn't his original intention to create a new Linux distro, but rather to learn how "el torito" (the booting mechanism on CDs) works, and how to get access to a whole CD from a minimal ramdisk system. However, his project soon attracted the attention of the LinuxTag association, which happily provided a mailing list and forum so that others could give their input. Though Klaus was (and still is) the solo developer of Knoppix, user feedback and bug-testing have helped make this distro the great success it is.


One could even posit the claim that Ubuntu's rapid rise in popularity back in 2004 was at least in part due to Klaus Knopper's grand efforts with Knoppix several years prior to this.

To wit:

- The option to run as a LiveCD in addition to the installation option typical of Ubuntu.

- The advantages described in the first quoted paragraph above.

- "Cheat codes", enabling the LiveCD to successfully boot up under a fairly wide range of hardware specifications (e.g., memory, hard drive, graphics/video).

- The surprisingly-overlooked *significance of providing the person running a LiveCD such as Knoppix to fairly easily download any other Linux ISO image and then fairly easily burn the Linux ISO image onto CD.

* One must remember that Knoppix's capability of more effectively introducing Linux to Windows came about BEFORE Canonical's 'ShipIt' program became as popular as it did for obtaining free Ubuntu CDs!!
BernardSwiss

Sep 12, 2011
8:24 PM EDT 		Yeah, I showed off the Knoppix Live CD at the computer shop where I bought my new Windows computer: it booted, identified and set up the hardware, identified and hooked into the Lan, and left off at a nice KDE with multiple desktops and useful software already in place -- all in two or maybe three minutes. The guys in the shop openly asked how come Windows couldn't do that.

(On the other hand, the place is still purely a Windows shop...)
gus3

Sep 12, 2011
10:30 PM EDT 		So the correct answer would be, "Because your bean counters and lawyers won't allow it."
Scott_Ruecker

Sep 13, 2011
5:08 PM EDT 		Windoze can't do a lot of things..;-)

Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]

Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!