Posted on October 23, 2008 - by admin

How Linux and Open Source Software Saved Windows – And My Laptop

BSOD’d (Blue Screen of Death’d for those of you who don’t know) again. My Windows XP laptop won’t even boot fully before I hear that wonderful “brap”, followed by the blue screen. I forget what the exact error was, but it said there was a compatibly issue between a new piece of hardware and XP. I had just got back from Boston and unloaded all of my pictures, and my laptop crashed before I could load them all onto the backup drive. Damn.

I tried basically everything. Even pulled the hard disc and used an enclosure, thinking maybe it was the memory in the laptop, the only thing I had replaced in the last few weeks. I thought for sure all of those pictures were gone. At least I had everything else backed up. I was flipping through my CD binder to find my restore discs, when I found a Knoppix disc.

Knoppix is an open source Linux distro, based on Debian, that boots and runs from a CD. Now, this isn’t just another live Linux throw-out, it’s a full featured desktop environment, with hundreds of open source applications, including GIMP, FireFox, Konqueror, and more.

I had downloaded a copy after I had to help my cousin (re)set up and restore his server, but he didn’t have a local Linux system at his house. This was cool because I just brought it with me, configured everything from the CD, and all the changes stuck. Sweet.

So at this point, I figure, ah, what the hell, the worst that can happen is she boots to the same place as before, and I reinstall windows. Big whoop.

Well, much to my surprise, the CD booted right up. Now I wasn’t really sure what to do. I had some issues with my wifi, because I couldn’t download ndis-wrapper (because it was running on a CD), so I had to go add a cat 5, and it worked just fine. I then tried to find my local backup server, but it didn’t want to connect to it for whatever reason. After some wiring re-arranging, I rebooted, and bam! It was working just fine. I opened Konqueror, and literally dragged and dropped from my fried system over to the server. Perfect. After this, I reinstalled windows, and haven’t had a problem sense.

This just goes to show you what a joke Windows and other proprietary software can be. XP saved by a 700mb bootable disc. Embarrassing for windows? Or a complement to open-source? I’d say a bit of both.

Check out the tutorials section tomorrow, as I’m going to write a full tutorial on not only installing/booting Knoppix, but exactly how I used it to save my windows machine, along with a few others sense. I think you’ll like it!

In th mean time, why don’t you have a peek at the Knoppix site, Knopper.net (english).