Finnix

Finnix is a Debian based Live CD Linux distribution, developed by Ryan Finnie and intended for system administrators for tasks such as filesystem recovery, network monitoring and OS installation.Linux Complete Backup Recovery and HOWTO Finnix is a small Linux Distribution, with an ISO download size of approximately 100 MiB.

 History 
Finnix was created in 1999, making it one of the oldest Linux distributions with the intent of being run completely from a bootable CD (the other Live CD around at the time was the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card CD, first released in 1999).Linux.com - A tale of two Linux bootable business cards Finnix 0.01 was based on Red Hat Linux 6.1, and was created to help with administration and recovery of other Linux workstations around Finnie's office..

On 23 October 2005, Finnix 86.0 was released. Earlier unreleased versions (84, and 85.0 through 85.3) were "Knoppix remasters", with support for Linux LVM and dm-crypt being the main reason for creation. However, 86.0 was a departure from Knoppix, and was derived directly from the Debian "testing" tree.

 Usage 
Finnix is released as a small bootable CD ISO. A user can download the ISO, burn the image to CD, and boot into a text mode Linux environment. Finnix requires at least 32MiB RAM to run properly, but can use more if present. Most hardware devices are detected and dealt with automatically, such as hard drives, network cards and USB devices. A user can modify files nearly anywhere on the running CD via UnionFS, a filesystem that can stack a read-write filesystem (in this case, a dynamic ramdisk) on top of a read-only filesystem (the CD media). Any changes made during the Finnix session are transparently written to RAM and discarded upon shutdown. In addition, Finnix uses SquashFS to keep distribution size low.

Finnix can be run completely within RAM, provided the system has at least 192 MiB RAM available.

Version  Release date  Kernel  Packages  Code name 0.03   22 March 2000  2.2.12  242  none 86.0   23 October 2005  2.6.13  336  none 86.1   21 November 2005  2.6.14  346/336  none 86.2   8 January 2006  2.6.15  343/336  none 87.0   31 March 2006  2.6.16  356/347  none 88.0   2 August 2006  2.6.17  359/349  Pulaski 89.0   22 January 2007  2.6.18  366/359  Oshkosh 89.1   13 April 2007  2.6.18  365/359  Sheboygan 89.2   27 July 2007  2.6.18  365/359  Crivitz 90.0   23 October 2007  2.6.22  367/362  Kaukauna 91.0   29 January 2008  2.6.24  370/366  Seymour 91.1   4 March 2008  2.6.24  364/354  Crivitz

Notes:
 "Code names" in Finnix refer to the development cycle leading up to the release, and not the release itself. Releases are signified by version number.
 Versions with two package counts in the table above represent x86 and PowerPC package counts, respectively.

 References 

 Other websites 
 Finnix homepage

Category:Linux distributions
Category:Live CD
Category:X86-64 Linux distributions
Category:Debian-based Linux distributions