Klaus Knopper
Encyclopedia
Klaus Knopper is a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 electrical engineer and free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 developer. "My nationality from my passport is austrian, not german, though I will absolutely not complain about being listed as "german engineer", because I was born and have lived in Germany all of my life", - says Klaus Knopper.

Knopper is the creator of Knoppix
Knoppix
Knoppix, or KNOPPIX , is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD / DVD or a USB key , one of the first of its kind for any operating system. Knoppix was developed by Linux consultant Klaus Knopper. When starting a program, it is loaded from the removable medium...

, a well-known live CD
Live CD
A live CD, live DVD, or live disc is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive...

 Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 distribution. He received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology (in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

: Technische Universität Kaiserslautern), co-founded LinuxTag
LinuxTag
LinuxTag is a Free Software expo with an emphasis on Linux , held every summer in Germany. It is relatively large, claiming that it is the largest expo of this kind in Europe, drawing visitors from many countries....

 in 1996 (a major Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an Linux expo) and has been a self-employed information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

 consultant since 1998. He also teaches at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences.

Knopper is married to Adriane Knopper, who has a visual impairment
Visual impairment
Visual impairment is vision loss to such a degree as to qualify as an additional support need through a significant limitation of visual capability resulting from either disease, trauma, or congenital or degenerative conditions that cannot be corrected by conventional means, such as refractive...

. She has been assisting Knopper with a version of Knoppix for blind
Blindness
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...

 and visually impaired people, released in the third quarter of 2007 as a Live CD. Her name has been given to the distribution: Adriane Knoppix.

Adriane is rather a desktop or "Non-graphical-userinterface" for blind computer beginners than a "distribution". It will work on top of any GNU/Linux distribution that has a screenreader (Preferably SBL) and some text-based tools for internet access and normal work.

Nowadays, Knoppix is mainly used on USB-Flashdisk, and the DVD iso version is the main distribution media, though the CD-Version still exists as a start or base for other live-distris. Therefore "a well-known live CD Linux distribution" may not be entirely appropriate.

External links

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