Grml, all year every year. The true swiss army knife of Linux live for sysadmins and repair techs.
Have a spare desktop from 2007 in the recycle heap, and wish it were running FOG, or Smokeping, for you to throw it on a network? 10 minutes with grml-debootstrap.
Have a failing hard drive and need to recover data? Grml has you covered with ddrescue and testdisk/photorec.
Need to work on a RAID array or LV? You know grml gonna have both mdadm and lvm (
but it won't start them by default, because it doesn't want to risk damaging your data)!
Want to throw up a temp PXE server and (for example) simultaneously DBAN a whole 30-machine computer lab? Grml includes tftpd and 2 (count 'em) different DHCP servers!
smartmontools, memtest86, kpartx, nwipe, clamav, chntpw, iperf, nmap, tcpdump.... the
list goes on. At the moment, I have trouble thinking of a single Linux-based hardware or network utility that I've ever needed, anywhere, that's not included in grml.
You can have
both x86 and amd64 together on your DVD, selectable at boot time. It boots even on cranky old Mac EFIs. It boots you right to a handful of password-less root and non-root ttys running screen, gpm and zsh; no GUI unless you ask. More convenience is hard to imagine.
I have pretty much stopped using all other bootable tools except grml. I carry with me a multi-boot USB key created with YUMI, but all I ever seem to use it for is grml :D Having used grml for years now, I've only scratched the surface of its features. I can't praise its creators highly enough. Thank you for reading :)
