Version 8.6 of the popular Debian-derived Linux distribution Knoppix was released on Sunday, rebasing the distribution on Debian 10 (Buster)—released on July 9—with select packages from Debian’s testing and unstable branches to enable support for newer graphics hardware. Knoppix is among the first Linux distributions that can be run live from a DVD, and continues to enjoy a great deal of popularity among Linux enthusiasts.
Knoppix 8.6 is notable for being the first publicly-released version of the distribution to abandon systemd, an init system built by Red Hat’s Lennart Poettering intended to replace sysvinit. While adoption of systemd was the subject of considerable controversy and criticism, it is the mainstream default, used by Knoppix’s upstream Debian, as well as other Debian forks such as Ubuntu and Mint; RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora; openSUSE and SLES, as well as Mageia, and by default in Arch.
I stay far away from the systemd debate – mostly because I honestly have no clue – but I was actually kind of surprised Knoppix was still around. It’s one of the oldest Linux live CDs around, and somehow I find it comforting that it’s still seeing development.
Nostalgia… Knoppix was my 1st Linux experiment in 2003. There was many more since 😉 (I remember downloading the live-cd on my dial-up internet, it took days!!!)
Really the security implications of systemd are basically the only legit complaint. If they did it for that, well thats kind fair, depending on the init system they chose to replace it. I think the lesson these days is that everything is insecure, so make sure you have ways of catching bad behaving components and restricting them to least privileged. With the last round of systemd security issues, there were a number of distros that were not exploitable because they had other measures in place to prevent that kind of vulnerability. I think that’s the right approach rather than using a different init system which doesn’t solve the problems that systemd does. I really like the power it provides
Another complaint could simply be that alternatives like RunIt are easier to use (simpler configuration, plain-text logs with your choice of logging daemon, etc), more faithful to the unix philosophy in that they are very small and simple systems, and more modular (you can even use RunIt as a service manager overtop of SysV init if you want, or on other OSes). They also tend to break less random stuff (like systemd breaking tmux, as an example).
I think that being simpler and easier to configure, debug, and less destructive to userland are big advantages when it comes to reliability.
Yeah, agreed. Systemd reminds me of the Windows service control and task scheduling subsystems. It’s great when it works but, when it doesn’t, it can be a devil of a time to comb through unnecessarily obscured binary log data. I’ll take clear text logs for diagnostic purposes any day of the week.
For sure… I myself prefer inittab, like SlackWare Linux uses (my fav distro). 🙂 Althought I am a fan of the apt-get/apt/aptitude package manager system.
Some of the ideas came from launchd on Apple actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
Agree to disagree. Nothing compares to the power and ease of systemd.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
IMHO systemd wins over sys-v init scripts, however too often the debate is framed in such a way that precludes any consideration of alternatives, which is unfortunate because I honestly think people would like some of the alternatives. Some alternatives are more intuitive and simpler than both systemd and sys-v with less to go wrong. I’m happy when I see routers and such running a simple init system like runit. While 99% of the time systemd works, when things go wrong it can be much harder to fix. The philosophy behind “keep it simple, stupid” is to eliminate unnecessary complexity, which is something that we software developers sometimes forget. By not trying to be everything and instead limiting the scope of the init system to just being an init system, it makes the init system more robust, decreases bugs and surprises.
I understand why knoppix is doing this, I crossed the same bridge in my own distro where I built a custom init system and it’s worked out great, In hindsight I made the right choice for me as it’s been more robust than my computers with systemd
I don’t think we will agree here. I adhere to the perlish philosophy “keep easy things easy and difficult things possible”. IMHO systemd is the only one that makes very difficult things possible because of cgroups. Until someone else does a cgroups based init system, its the best cgroups based init.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
But it was never limited to systemd, I was using cgroups even before systemd. Even an init system that doesn’t use cgroups can support cgroups through containers that are more powerful than systemd.
Ideally one could even deploy docker for the ultimate use of cgroups from any init system, but alas this raises one of the big gripes with systemd for non systemd users, which is that more and more software is getting snagged by systemd tentacles and precluding the easy use of alternative init systems.
https://serverfault.com/questions/913427/is-it-possible-to-have-ubuntu-docker-container-without-systemd/913625
So although we may disagree on choice of init systems for ourselves, disagreement is fairly inconsequential in and of itself as long as we each get to go about our day using our preferred tools. This is how things should work. The real problem is that systemd’s tight coupling is causing major headaches for users with custom setups. Loosely coupled interfaces would promote flexibility over favoritism. This is an area where unix has traditionally excelled at by providing a wealth of single purpose tools and letting users pipe data between them to achieve more flexibility than any single tool can offer. Unfortunately the systemd crowd doesn’t really give a crap about playing nicely with others. which sucks. It wouldn’t take that much to address the problems, except the systemd leadership have not been sympathetic to the needs of others. 🙁
“Ideally one could even deploy docker for the ultimate use of cgroups from any init system, but alas this raises one of the big gripes with systemd for non systemd users,”
It’s been a while, but last time I looked RancherOS is basically 2 docker daemons, one for system Docker containers and one for ‘user-space’ Docker containers:
https://rancher.com/rancher-os/
Lennie,
I find it hard to pick up new distros these days since they all seem to blur together after a while with insufficient differentiation, haha. But you are right this looks very interesting with a novel approach. The website gives off a vibe that they’re primarily interested in paying enterprise customers rather than normal end users, I’m not sure if that matters since it looks like you can download the software anyways. This would be a cool topic to discuss on it’s own.
Good to see Knoppix still in active development.
The first practical use I had for it was to test a second-hand IBM Thinkpad under Linux, to make sure (1) the hardware was in good working order, and (2) the software knew how to work with the hardware. Yes on both counts, so I bought it. Today, that Thinkpad is my dad’s solitaire machine. 🙂 It’s no exaggeration to say it was built to last.
Since then, my primary use for Knoppix is forensics and recovery. What went wrong? and How do I fix it? Knoppix has served me phenomenally well for 15 years and counting.