Finnix is a

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

-based

Live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete booting, bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than lo ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

, developed by Ryan Finnie and intended for system administrators for tasks such as filesystem recovery, network monitoring and OS installation. Finnix is a relatively small distribution, with an

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

download size of approximately 100 MiB, and is available for the

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

and

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

architectures, and paravirtualized ( User Mode Linux and

Xen Xen (pronounced ) is a free and open-source type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge C ...

) systems. Finnix can be run off a bootable CD, a

USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...

, a

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

, or

network boot Network booting, shortened netboot, is the process of booting a computer from a network rather than a local drive. This method of booting can be used by routers, diskless workstations and centrally managed computers (thin clients) such as publ ...

(

PXE PXE may refer to: Science and technology * Pentium Extreme Edition, a variant of the Pentium D microprocessor * Preboot Execution Environment, booting computers via a network * Pseudoxanthoma elasticum, a genetic disease Other uses * Proof and Exp ...

History

Finnix development first began in 1999, making it one of the oldest

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s released with the intent of being run completely from a bootable CD (the other Live CD around at the time was the

Linuxcare Linuxcare is an American IT services company founded in San Francisco in 1998 by Dave Sifry, Arthur Tyde and Dave LaDuke. The company's initial goal was to be "the 800 number for Linux" and operate 24 hours a day. Due to the dot-com bubble of the e ...

Bootable Business Card CD, first released in 1999). Finnix 0.01 was based on

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

6.0, and was created to help with administration and recovery of other Linux workstations around Finnie's office. The first public release of Finnix was 0.03, and was released in early 2000, based on an updated Red Hat Linux 6.1. Despite its 300 MiB ISO size and requirement of 32 MiB

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

(which, given RAM prices and lack of high-speed Internet proliferation at the time, was prohibitive for many), Finnix enjoyed moderate success, with over 10,000 downloads. After version 0.03, development ceased, and Finnix was left unmaintained until 2005. On 23 October 2005, Finnix 86.0 was released. Earlier unreleased versions (84, and 85.0 through 85.3) were "

Knoppix Knoppix, stylized KNOPPIX ( ), is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD or DVD (Live CD) or a USB flash drive ( Live USB). It was first released in 2000 by German Linux consultant Klaus Knopper, and was one ...

remasters", with support for Linux LVM and

dm-crypt dm-crypt is a transparent block device encryption subsystem in Linux kernel versions 2.6 and later and in DragonFly BSD. It is part of the device mapper (dm) infrastructure, and uses cryptographic routines from the kernel's Crypto API. Unlike ...

being the main reason for creation. However, 86.0 was a departure from Knoppix, and was derived directly from the

"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 32 MiB RAM to run properly, but can use more if present. Most hardware devices are detected and dealt with automatically, such as hard drives,

network card A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter and physical network interface) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Early network interface ...

s and USB devices. A user can modify files nearly anywhere on the running CD via a

union mount In computer operating systems, union mounting is a way of combining multiple directories into one that appears to contain their combined contents. Union mounting is supported in Linux, Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD and several of its success ...

filesystem (

UnionFS Unionfs is a filesystem service for Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD which implements a union mount for other file systems. It allows files and directories of separate file systems, known as branches, to be transparently overlaid, forming a single cohe ...

or AUFS, depending on the Finnix release), stacking 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 Squashfs is a compressed read-only file system for Linux. Squashfs compresses files, inodes and directories, and supports block sizes from 4 KiB up to 1 MiB for greater compression. Several compression algorithms are supported. Squashfs is ...

to keep distribution size low. Finnix can be run completely within RAM, provided the system has at least 192 MiB RAM available. If a "toram" option is passed to Finnix, most of the contents of the CD are copied to a

RAM disk A RAM drive (also called a RAM disk) is a block of random-access memory ( primary storage or volatile memory) that a computer's software is treating as if the memory were a disk drive (secondary storage). RAM drives provide high-performance te ...

, and the CD is ejected, freeing the CD-ROM drive for other purposes. Finnix can also be placed on a bootable USB thumb drive, or installed permanently on a hard drive (though still functioning as if it were a LiveCD). Finnix 102 Xen demo

Finnix is available for several processor architectures. The primary architecture is

, with an additional

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

kernel included.

support is available with most releases as a separate CD, released concurrently with its x86 counterpart. In addition, Finnix is aware of both the User Mode Linux and

virtualization systems. UML and Xen

Virtual private server A virtual private server (VPS) or virtual dedicated server (VDS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting company. A virtual private server runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and customers may have superuser- ...

providers such as

Linode Linode () is an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines and cloud infrastructure. From the time of its launch in 2003, Linode provided virtual private server (VPS) hosting. Linode was acquired by ...

can provide Finnix as a recovery/maintenance distribution to their customers.

Versions

New versions of Finnix are released every 3 months on average, with updated software from the Debian "testing" tree, along with new Finnix-specific functionality. Versions 86.0 through 93.0 used a

major/minor Major/minor compositions are musical compositions that begin in a major key and end in a minor key (generally the parallel minor), specifying the keynote (as C major/minor). This is a very unusual form in tonal music, although examples became m ...

versioning scheme, with major releases usually including major functionality changes, and minor releases including minor fixes and Debian updates to bring Finnix's packages up to date with Debian's "testing" tree. Beginning with version 100, releases are numbered as a simple incrementing integer. Development builds are named after cities and towns in

Wisconsin Wisconsin ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest of the United States. It borders Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michig ...

References

External links

* {{linux-distro 2000 software Debian-based distributions X86-64 Linux distributions PowerPC operating systems Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Light-weight Linux distributions LiveDistro Live USB Linux distributions