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Finnix is a Debian based LiveCD Linux distribution, 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 a ISO download size of approximately 100MiB, and is available for the x86, PowerPC, User Mode Linux and Xen architectures. Finnix can be run off a bootable CD, USB thumb drive, or hard drive.
History
Finnix development first began in 1999, making it one of the oldest distributions released with the intent of being run completely from a bootable CD (the other LiveCD around at the time was the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card CD). Finnix 0.01 was based on Red Hat Linux 6.1, 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 6.2. Despite its 300MiB ISO size and requirement of 32MiB RAM (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. Unfortunately, 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 remasters", with support for Linux LVM and dm-crypt being the main reason for creation. However, 86.0 was a departure from Knoppix, and was derived directly from the Debian "testing" tree. Today, Finnix includes some software written for Knoppix (such as hwsetup, the utility responsible for loading kernel modules based on probed PCI devices), but the two distributions are considered separate and serve different purposes.
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 32MiB RAM to run properly, but can use more if present. Most hardware devices are detected and dealt with automatically, such as hard drives, network cards and USB devices. A user can modify files nearly anywhere on the running CD via UnionFS, a filesystem that can stack 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 to keep distribution size low. A SquashFS filesystem takes a regular filesystem tree and compresses it, often achieving a 3:1 compression ratio. Then, when the filesystem is mounted, data chunks are decompressed on-the-fly.
Finnix can be run completely within RAM, provided the system has at least 192MiB RAM available. If a "toram" option is passed to Finnix, most of the contents of the CD are copied to a ramdisk, and the CD is ejected, freeing the CDROM drive for other purposes. Finnix can also be placed on a bootable USB thumb drive, or installed permanently on a hard drive.
Finnix is available for several architectures. The primary (and most popular) architecture is x86, but a nearly identical functioning distribution is released concurrently for the PowerPC architecture. In addition, Finnix is aware of both the User Mode Linux and Xen virtualization systems. In particular, the Finnix x86 CD includes a system called Finnix on Finnix, which, through UML, can boot multiple concurrent instances of Finnix, using the same CD the main Finnix instance was booted from. UML and Xen Virtual private server providers such as Linode can provide Finnix as a recovery/maintenance distribution to their customers.
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