Brief Description: Prime mover of Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs directly from a CD
Further Details:
Born in Germany in 1968 where he's lived ever since, Klaus Knopper has a diploma in electrical engineering, and has been a self-employed IT-consultant since 1998.
Knoppix was started about 3 years ago as an experiment for personal use (learning how el torito boot works, and how to get access to a whole CD from a minimal ramdisk system). His friends from the LinuxTag association convinced him to make it an open project, and provided mailing lists and a forum for this purpose.
Without touching the hard drive, Knoppix can boot practically any PC into Linux complete with multiple GUI environments, a ton of applications, and utilities while grabbing an IP address from a DHCP server.
in other words, unlike other Linux distributions, Knoppix does not need to be installed on a computer's hard disk - it runs directly from the CD. All you need to do is to place it into your CD-ROM drive and restart the computer. A few minutes later you will have a fully working Linux workstation with all major desktop environments, server software, multimedia, office and productivity applications you can think of.
This amazing product is Klaus Knopper's very own brainchild.
Currently, there are about 3000 downloads per day, and there are quite a few project forks in different languages maintained by independent groups.
Knopper works on Knoppix alone with occasional help from people on the mailing lists, mostly in the form of translations or patches for shell scripts. The offical Web site for Knoppix is on his personal Web site, at http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html.
"So far, Knoppix boots fine on about 95% of all tested desktop PCs," Knopper says, "and roughly 75% of notebooks (some of them have exotic graphics or sound/pcmcia chipsets, sometimes you have to use boot options to get them working)."
About Jeremy Geelan Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo series, of the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo and founder of Web 2.0 Journal, AJAXWorld Magazine and other major SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.
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