Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. It is not intended to be installed as a permanent installation. Instead, the aim of Finnix is to enable system administrators to perform essential system maintenance including filesystem recovery such as mounting and manipulating hard drives and partitions, and to rebuild boot records. It is also useful for installing other operating systems, and monitor networks. A wealth of utilities are included. Finnix can boot from a CD, USB flash drive, hard drive, or network boot.
Finnix has received recognition from the community and Virtual Private Server Providers (e.g. Linode) offer this distribution for their customers to maintain and recover virtualized servers.
Finnix is targeted at system administrators who are happy with the command line. It is the oldest LiveCD project still in production.
Features include:
- Full support for network booting, via PXE on x86 platforms, or by direct .OpenFirmware network boot on PowerPC platforms.
- Support for isohybrid.
- Support for findiso.
- Support for several platforms, including x86/AMD64 and PowerPC architectures, as well as support for Xen and User Mode Linux (UML) virtualization systems.
- Single-disk DOS utility distribution, based on FreeDOS.
- Forensic mode, which is designed to avoid automatic actions that could potentially change data on media.
- Hundreds of tools included.
Website: www.finnix.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: Ryan Finnie
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
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