Finnix is a Debian-based Live CD operating system, developed by Ryan Finnie and intended for system administrators for tasks such as filesystem recovery, network monitoring and OS installation. Finnix is a relatively small distribution, with an ISO download size of approximately 100 MiB, and is available for the x86 and PowerPC architectures, and paravirtualized (User Mode Linux and Xen) systems. Finnix can be run off a bootable CD, a USB flash drive, a hard drive, or network boot (PXE).
- Developer: Ryan Finnie
- OS family: Unix-like
- Working state: Current
- Source model: Open source
- Initial release: March 22, 2000; 18 years ago
- Marketing target: System administrators
- Available in: English
- Platforms: i386, x86-64, PowerPC, UML, Xen
- Kernel type: Monolithic (Linux)
- Default user interface: Console
- License: Various
- Official website: www.finnix.org
Finnix is freely distributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Description from official website:
Finnix is a self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution (“LiveCD”) for system administrators, based on Debian. You can mount and manipulate hard drives and partitions, monitor networks, rebuild boot records, install other operating systems, and much more. Finnix includes the latest technology for system administrators, with Linux kernel 3.0, x86 and PowerPC support, hundreds of sysadmin-geared packages, and much more. And above all, Finnix is small; currently the entire distribution is over 400MiB, but is dynamically compressed into a small bootable image. Finnix is not intended for the average desktop user, and does not include any desktops, productivity tools, or sound support, in order to keep distribution size low.