Tidying up after Linux 16770
snips
It does do "all sorts of hardware detection", making it one of the easiest systems as far as auto-loading the requisite drivers to use your system. Before Knoppix, a lot of distros required at least some detailed knowledge on your part about what hardware was installed and what drivers you needed; Knoppix's answer was to simply make the detection and auto-loading code work easily and effectively, and a lot
A to a diagnostics distro, yes, it can be used as that - as can pretty much any distro, simply because they tend to include so many good and useful tools for such things.
Knoppix is often used as a diagnostic distro because it is so complete and it runs off a CD. That CD is compressed, so it actually has around 2 gigs of stuff installed. It...
I use Knoppix as a diagnostics distro, precisely because it is a complete system on a disk, letting me do things - fixing disks, mounting foreign parbreastions, sharing files across a LAN, etc, etc, etc - that I can not only figure out what the problems on the system are, I can either fix them or, at least, recover the data before reformatting.
What you have to remember, though, is that this isn't because Knoppix is a "geek fixit system"; it's simply a typical Linux distro. All that makes it special in that regard is that it is exactly that - a typical Linux distro - it just happens to run off a CD. This means you get essentially a complete, fully-flexible, fully-functional, very well loaded Linux system, with almost every kind of tool you could want, all on a single bootable CD.
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