RIPLinux 7.7
Don’t worry, Linux is not dead yet. And the $TITLE is not about a new RIP implementation on Linux. The name stands for Recovery Is Possible and it’s in fact a Slackware-based Live OS.
It can be used for various tasks like maintenance, troubleshooting, rescuing an installed system, or even as a Live OS for browsing the Internet, chatting with friends, listening to music or watching movies. All that at a cost of a 90MB ISO image.
RIPLinux comes in different versions (X, non-X, Grub, Grub2, PXE) and it’s a lightweight distro, only requiring 256MB of RAM and a 586 CPU to run.
Boot options
The boot menu offers a lot of choices:
I tried booting both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels and a Windows XP partition with no issues. It even offers support for Windows Vista Bootmgr and for any other partition that has a boot manager on it. For that, several pre-configured Grub entries are available, but all lines are editable so they can be customized to your needs.
The Desktop
The X version offers a graphical environment running on tty9. The default screen resolution was 1024×768 which is reasonable considering that I was running RIPLinux as a guest OS in vmware-server. Of course, non-graphical terminals are available too with CTRL+ALT+F{1-8} .
Recovery tools
There are quite a few tools included that can help you diagnose a faulty system.
- system monitoring: lshw, atop, htop, dmesg, dmidecode, mount utility (of course, these tools come with most of the Linux distros today but they could be useful to detect I/O errors, BIOS warnings, damaged partitions)
- partitioning: fdisk, cfdisk, Ghost For Linux, GParted, Grub, Partimage, Testdisk (the list of supported partition types includes EXT4, Reiser4 and NTFS)
- QEMU emulator (boot ISO, HDD or floppy images)
- F-PROT antivirus (can be used to scan mounted Windows partitions)
As a test, I successfully mounted a NTFS partition, modified a couple of files and scan it with F-PROT antivirus. I also played with partimage to create partition backups.
Other tools
RIPLinux includes a network configuration tool. It supports both wired and wireless connections. I’ve only tried the Ethernet as I didn’t have a wireless card to play with. Having Internet access while troubleshooting is important, that’s why you’ll find these applications very useful:
- remote connection clients (ftp, ssh, telnet, rdesktop)
- IM/IRC (Gaim, XChat)
- mail (Fetchmail, mutt)
- newsreaders
- Internet browsers (Firefox, Links)
- online and offline documentation
Other applications
I was able to play my mp3 files thanks to xmms, watch movies with xine and view pdf files with PDF Viewer. RIPLinux also includes several file managers, an archive extractor and even a GUI for rsync.
Issues
I only had issues trying to install/update some of the packages. The installation tools are either Slack based (installpkg) or BASH scripts (install-pkg). nmap installation failed each time with a “Not Found” error, while ntfs3g update worked second time I tried.
Conclusions
RIPLinux includes tools for system recovery and a series of scripts for self mainetance tasks (e.g. update-pkg, install-pkg) that can install and/or update several of its packages. That makes it a great choice for troubleshooting system issues using latest versions of the recovery tools.
Don’t forget that recovery is possible!
February 21st, 2009 at 4:24 PM
You had me going there for a moment :p
February 22nd, 2009 at 8:59 AM
[...] Linux – Recovery is Possible | linuxsysconfig By depatty RIP Linux – Recovery is Possible | linuxsysconfig Don’t worry, Linux is not dead yet. And the $TITLE is not about a new RIP implementation on [...]
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:09 AM
Very nice dude :)
February 22nd, 2009 at 5:52 PM
nice review man
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:08 PM
[...] RIPLinux 7.7 Don’t worry, Linux is not dead yet. And the $TITLE is not about a new RIP implementation on Linux. The name stands for Recovery Is Possible and it’s in fact a Slackware-based Live OS. [...]
May 1st, 2009 at 6:21 AM
my server through rip and rsp error in linux os
September 14th, 2009 at 10:03 PM
RIPLinux is an incredibly well implemented utility/rescue system, I’m really impressed. It has something which I’ve not seen anywhere else, a menu driven grub2 install and configuration utility, with helpful prompts. Given the inadequate and incomplete state of documentation of the grub2 project this is a real boon and makes a previously uncertain and tedious task very easily and reliably accomplished. It also has better wired and wireless networking setup than many regular distros. The simple curses or icewm(?) interfaces might look a little intimidating to a new user but go beyond that impression and in fact this system is user friendly and helpfully documented. A very neat tool.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:38 AM
Thanks for the neat review. It would be great if somebody can come up with a comparative review of this and similar so-called rescue distros. I’m sure many people would like to find out which one is the smallest, fastest and easiest to use for purposes of maintenance and recovery.
January 16th, 2011 at 1:35 PM
[...] are geared towards system rescue and maintance. Personally I like Slitaz, CDlinux, and RIPLinuX (short review) if I need a GUI based rescue CD. There are plenty of command line tools to resize as well. If you [...]
May 10th, 2011 at 6:54 AM
the RIP-Linux is amazing to recover deleted partition and other tools are also very very useful for technical person.