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Recovery Is Possible (RIP) is a small, specialized Linux distribution that includes a large number of system maintenance and recovery applications. The disc is mainly oriented at the experienced Linux user that knows what he is doing, and thus does not contain automated scripts for many common tasks (such as undeleting files, creating partitions, and the such). RIP disc comes in two flavors, one with the X Window System and without; usually, the non-X disc is released a few days after the X11 distro as the author takes time to compile and quickly test the build. The operating system's X11-capable version does not require X11 to be started at bootup, and can be started at any time after booting wihtout the server; the main purpose of X11 is to provide the capability to run GParted, a GTK partition management program, and Mozilla Firefox, because it might be relaxing to casually browse the web while performing long and "boring" tasks. MPlayer is also included and Firefox is shipped with the mplayerplug-in extension to allow most embedded media on the web to be viewed; Adobe Flash is not included due to copyright restrictions, though it may be optionally installed by running a script to download and install Flash.
Some common uses of RIP are the following:
* TestDisk to recover deleted partitions, by ignoring the MBR and checking cylinders for known filesystem structures (such as FAT, NTFS, ext2/3, ReiserFS 3/4, XFS, etc)
* PhotoRec to recover deleted files, by ignoring the filesystem and checking disk blocks for known file types
* fdisk, cfdisk, parted, and GParted (optional with the X11 version) for partition management
* ntfsprogs (ntfsresize, ntfsclone, ntfsfix, mkntfs, etc) in order to resize, backup/restore, schedule a chkdsk at Windows bootup, and other operations to NTFS filesystems
The current version of RIP is 1.9 (June 23, 2006).
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