Even before today, I couldn't say enough good things about Knoppix, the coolest run-from-CD Linux Distribution ever. But it gets better.
When I got home from flying this evening, there were two messages on my answering machine. Both were my Dad telling me that his work laptop was fubar. He wanted to find a way to backup the data to his Linux box (one that I setup for him as a home server last year--that he doesn't know much about). And this had to happen tonight because the laptop is going in for service tomorrow and they'll likely just blast the drive.
Oh, and he's three time zones ahead of me.
It sounded bleak.
I called him. In the first two or three minutes of the conversation, he explained that he'd used a Knoppix CD that came with a book he bought to mount the partition with all his data on it. He just needed to know how to get the data from the laptop to the the server.
I was a little shocked. I never figured he'd have gotten this far on his own. He's apparently been reading up on Linux recently. That's cool.
It took a bit of time, but I was able to explain how to tar up the contents of the disk and the copy the data over to his server. All told, it took maybe an hour. Most of that was waiting on tar and the network.
Thank You Knoppix!
This could have been a major pain in the ass without Knoppix handy.