[fasterik]

When I was a kid I got obsessed with Linux, but my family only had one PC in the living room. After an attempt to set up Windows/Linux dual boot where I messed up the partition table, my parents banned me from tinkering with it. Luckily I discovered Knoppix and other live distros, which allowed me to boot into a safe environment to play around in.

[sevg]

I remember also hosing the bootloader somehow on my first try of Linux, luckily my personal desktop so no collatoral damage!

After that I always had a CD wallet thing with copies of sysresccd and supergrubdisk and others (including I think an old knoppix cd from a linux magazine).

[dijit]

Similar story here.

When I first started going towards Linux I tried, in this order:

* Puppy linux, because I liked puppies.

* College linux, because it was for education, and I was in secondary school, and college sounded fancy.

* Adriane Knoppix, because it's what came up when you did a web search for "knoppix download" -- that was interesting, if you didn't know, ADRIANE is for blind people.

* Whoppix (which became Whax) -- because I could actually find the download.

* Backtrack linux (because that was apparently better than WHAX)

* Slackware, because backtrack was based on this and "only script kiddies use Backtrack".

I did the same as you, tried to keep things to liveCDs but I always got the urge to install them, so would do it periodically until everything broke. This also meant I had to deal with whatever was broken (usually wifi).

One thing I remember very fondly though, which isn't a linux, is the leaked Geek Squad rescue CD... I'd give a decent chunk of change for an updated one of those..

[mikestorrent]

did you have a copy of Hiren's in there?

[J_McQuade]

I imagine that there are hundreds of us with very similar stories! I absolutely banjaxed our Windows partition after installing Mandrake or Suse or something on more than one occasion. I learned a lot about Linux, but probably more about the importance of backups haha.

[m-hodges]

Knoppix LiveCD in 2004 was my very first try at Linux. The fear of HDD partitioning my parents' PC delayed me from installing Ubuntu Warty by a few months.

[tnelsond4]

I also first used Linux via knoppix around 2004. Great introduction. Though my big sister said it was difficult to install it to the hard drive because it's meant to be a live cd, but she managed to do it, .

[fjert]

I had a similar experience that led me to Knoppix when I was a kid. I was tinkering around with a hex editor and messed up the Windows MBR with it so I found and burned Knoppix to a disc at a library. I remember my mom complaining about things being... different

[deathanatos]

I also wanted to experiment with Linux at a young age, and so I tried booting it with LOADLIN[1]. I didn't know what I was doing, but I did successfully boot the kernel with a minimal rootfs! So minimal, it didn't have an init — which of course causes a quick kernel panic. Didn't yet have the know how to figure out what I was doing wrong. My mom asked "did you mess up the computer?" Nope, since with LOADLIN you didn't need to format.

Had to give up on that approach, but discovered Knoppix shortly afterwards, and that taught me Linux.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin

[soulofmischief]

Who among us hasn't gotten in trouble for screwing up the boot partition on the family computer while trying to install Linux? It's a badge of honor.

[garkotipankaj]

Same story! I discovered Porteus (based on slackware) and used it from a 8gb sandisk usb for years. It shipped with xfce and was a blast to tinker with. I learned to compile software from source for it because the package management was non-existent. Taught me a lot. AAAND it's still live: https://www.porteus.org

[akoboldfrying]

I used a Porteus boot USB a couple of years ago to rescue the secondary hard drive on my Dad's ancient Windows 7 PC. The drive had partially died, making it inaccessible under Windows -- but 99% of the disk was still readable with Linux's NTFS support. There was some glitch that caused the GUI to lock up shortly after booting about 80% of the time, but if I could make it to the console tty it worked like a charm!