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!
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You had me going there for a moment :p
Very nice dude :)
nice review man
my server through rip and rsp error in linux os
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.
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.
the RIP-Linux is amazing to recover deleted partition and other tools are also very very useful for technical person.
I successfully burned the iso file and it loads nicely. But anything I try to do asks for a password. I don’t have a password, ergo I can’t start anything. Help!
@Yaacov: What exactly are you trying to do? I use the latest RIPLinuX 13.7 and it requires no password, upon booting you are logged in as root automatically in both text mode and X.
@admin
I progress up to the point where the black and white menu is displayed.
After that, anything I try, for example the first entry, I am queried for a password. I don’t know what password the program wants.
Oh, right. Just type “root” and press Enter (as displayed on the last line of the text menu). That will login you as root, no password is required. Alternatively, try booting to X instead (select 2nd boot option from the main menu).
Lordy lordy, hit me with a stupid stick!
Thanks admin, I do thank you. I also believe I had my head stuck where the sun don’t shine.:)