Finnix

Finnix is a Debian based Live CD Linux distribution, developed by Ryan Finnie and intended for system administrators for tasks such as filesystem recovery, network monitoring and OS installation.^[2] Finnix is a small Linux Distribution, with an ISO download size of approximately 100 MiB.

Finnix

Finnix 100 boot screen
Developer	Ryan Finnie
OS family	Unix-like
Working state	Current
Source model	Open source
Initial release	March 22, 2000; 25 years ago (2000-03-22)
Latest release	250[1]  / 22 March 2025; 9 months ago (22 March 2025)
Marketing target	System administrators
Available in	English
Update method	APT
Package manager	dpkg
Platforms	i386, x86-64, PowerPC, UML, Xen
Kernel type	Monolithic (Linux)
Default user interface	Console
License	Various
Official website	www.finnix.org

Finnix 88.0 default startup

History

Finnix was created in 1999, making it one of the oldest Linux distributions with the intent of being run completely from a bootable CD (the other Live CD around at the time was the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card CD, first released in 1999).^[3] 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..

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.^[4]

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.^[5]

Finnix can be run completely within RAM, provided the system has at least 192 MiB RAM available.

Version	Release date	Kernel	Packages	Code name
0.03 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	22 March 2000	2.2.12	242	none
86.0 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	23 October 2005	2.6.13	336	none
86.1 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	21 November 2005	2.6.14	346/336	none
86.2 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	8 January 2006	2.6.15	343/336	none
87.0 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	31 March 2006	2.6.16	356/347	none
88.0 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	2 August 2006	2.6.17	359/349	Pulaski
89.0 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	22 January 2007	2.6.18	366/359	Oshkosh
89.1 Archived 2008-06-12 at the Wayback Machine	13 April 2007	2.6.18	365/359	Sheboygan
89.2 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	27 July 2007	2.6.18	365/359	Crivitz
90.0 Archived 2008-06-16 at the Wayback Machine	23 October 2007	2.6.22	367/362	Kaukauna
91.0 Archived 2008-06-22 at the Wayback Machine	29 January 2008	2.6.24	370/366	Seymour
91.1 Archived 2008-07-06 at the Wayback Machine	4 March 2008	2.6.24	364/354	Crivitz

Notes:

• "Code names" in Finnix refer to the development cycle leading up to the release, and not the release itself. Releases are signified by version number.
• Versions with two package counts in the table above represent x86 and PowerPC package counts, respectively.