R.I.P. For Linux

R.I.P. stands for Recovery Is Possible and it’s an open-source and completely free distribution of GNU/Linux derived from one of the oldest Linux kernel-based operating systems in the world, Slackware. It is designed from the ground up to be used for recovering data from broken OSes or damaged hardware.

This Slackware-based distribution is distributed as a Live CD ISO image that has approximately 150MB in size. It is bootable on computers that support both the 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64) hardware platforms.

In order to use it, the user must first burn the ISO image to a CD disc using any CD/DVD burning software or write it to a USB thumb drive of 512MB or higher capacity using the UNetbootin or GNOME Disk Utility (Disks) applications.

Being designed as a text-mode rescue CD, Recovery Is Possible’s most important feature is the boot menu. From there, the user can start the rescue system in normal or failsafe mode, boot a small initrd system, as well as to perform a system memory diagnostic test.

The OS has support for a plethora of file system types, including EXT2/3/4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, XFS, JFS, ISO9660, UDF, UFS, HPFS, HFS, MINIX, MS-DOS, NTFS and VFAT. It supports IDE, SCSI and SATA, PCMCIA, RAID and LVM2 technologies.

The distribution contains a wide-range of command-line utilities aimed at rescue, recovery and general maintenance tasks. Among these, we can mention partimage, parted, reiserfsck, fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk, mke2fs, tune2fs, e2fsck, debugfs, mkntfs, jfs_mkfs, jfs_fsck, xfs_repair, cdrecord/dvdrecord, mkisofs, ntfsresize, dvd rw-format and growisofs.

The lynx, fetchmail, mutt, pop3spam, ncftp, popselect, epic irc, telnet, tin, wget, zgv, naim, testdisk, smbmount, smbclient, ssh/sshd, udp-sender/receiver, rsync, lde, rtvpatch, blesstivo, chntpw, grub, cmospwd, grubconfig, memtest86, smartctl, captive-ntfs, ddrescue, dd_rescue, dmidecode, acpitool, hwinfo, lshw and ethtool tools are also included.