Finnix Blog

Nearly 6 years ago, Finnix 0.03 made history as one of the first bootable CD Linux distributions. It may have taken awhile, but Finnix is back as a small (less than 100MB), fully-featured LiveCD for system administrators.

Finnix 86.0 includes 336 Debian packages, Linux kernel 2.6.13, and advanced system utilities such as LVM2. You can mount and manipulate hard drives and partitions, monitor networks, rebuild boot records, install other operating systems, and much more. Finnix can be run in as little as 32MB RAM, but if you have at least 192MB RAM, you can run the entire distribution from a ramdisk, saving access time during use, at the expense of a small wait during boot while the CD is copied to RAM (this wait is negligible due to the distribution’s small size).

Most importantly, Finnix can be burned to a “Mini-CDR”, which, as a fashion statement, goes great with your laptop bag or pocket.

Please visit http://www.finnix.org/ to learn more or download a copy!

I’ve spent the better part of the last 24 hours wrestling with making my newly-bought 512MB USB key reliably boot. As of now, though, I’ve got a key with a dev version of Finnix that boots… on, like, a lot of stuff!

This functionality will be in the final verson, come hell or high water.

Finnix version 86.0-pre3 has been released today. This is a public pre-release, intended to flush out as many bugs as possible before the big release. Because it is a pre-release, its CD layout is not optimized, and as a result you may hear some random seeks from older CDROM drives. Other than that, the CD is quite usable (I’ve been using it at work for a couple days now). If you find any bugs or issues, please use the bug tracking system to report it.

Finnix 86.0-pre3 is released! It was supposed to be 86.0-pre2, but that turned out to be a brown paper bag release (One of the last things I did was upgrade isolinux, and I tested nearly all “finnix” combinations of booting, but not “memtest”… it broke horribly.)

Anyways, download it (it’s just over 100MB for god sakes), test it, and let me know what breaks, if anything.

In the last week, I’m guessing that I’ve built and started approximately 500 ISOs, if not more.

In TOTALLY unrelated news, I’ve started work on Finnix again. I’ve almost got a stable product, and the website is completely redone.

(Check out the screenshots.)

Update: Yeah, I forgot to mention, it’s not out yet… but soon!